This I don't get and open to someone explaining it. There was a market rumour yesterday that committee was established to remove this rule ...markets jumped but that rumour was squashed by their government. Clearly it's causing pain and what happens with the next pandemic. Do the know something we don't?
I don't agree with the parent commenter, but wasn't Captain Marvel originally male? The female character of Captain Marvel in the movies was known as Ms. Marvel in the comics (until 2012): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carol_Danvers.
Miles morales is a different person. He is not Black Peter Parker. They coexist in context dead or alive or across universes or whatever.
If you watch a marvel movie you’ll see it’s mostly character drama, not superhero theatrics. The superhero alias is not the character.
The MCU captain America is currently the Falcon, a black guy, who is objectively much weaker (not a super soldier or powered in any way. He does have fancy flying tech but they’ve tried to convey that he’s clearly inferior). One of the more nuanced and better MCU entries directly addressing the inherent supremacist nature of superhero culture and the cultural implications of just switching the race of a cultural icon. Imo, those are actually important relevant themes to drudge through. They’re not forced woke ideas forced upon people. It’s very problematic if you can’t explore such ideas without criticism for trying to do so rather than critical responses to the ideas themselves.
As long as they keep the “TRON Lightcycle Power Run” ride open, it's still better than being stuck inside an IKEA (previously: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-china-62547503 ); at least you get some outdoor area.
> The sudden nature lockdowns have seen people fleeing shops - including a Shanghai branch of Swedish furniture giant Ikea - and workplaces as they try to avoid being trapped inside.
They're still able to have fun there. Rides continue to work :)
On the other side, in some parts of Europe there's a discussion to let the infected go to work (even with symptoms and of course, if one's feeling capable of work) - but, still, go to work with other infected/work with infected.
I can understand that with so high density in people even one infection can lead to big massive spreads and thus to overloaded capacity of local hospitals in less than 48h - but, it's too much. I don't have a suggestion how to handle that either.
The Best would be everyone just stick a few weeks to the measures and diminish the countless spots to a few controllable one's. If that would be possible, we would not only reduce the cases, but also slowly minimize the spreading. May be 1-2 months, everything wouldn't be a problem any more..
Their strategy is extremely successful. They have an excuse to lock people down and turn parts of the country into a prison any time they want.. forever!
Are you saying that the CCP just wants to lock up people for the perverse pleasure of having random people locked up?
Regimes lock up particular people when particular people are a threat. They may lock people up unnecessarily just to err on the side of caution. But if they overdo it it can backfire. So far the main reason I hear from Chinese people to criticize Xi and the CCP is mostly about COVID and lockdowns, and never for any of the reasons westerners point the finger against the regime
It's sort of a neo-hukou system? A positive covid signal is basically house arrest. Since they do covid tests in batches of 20, it is expected to get false positives.
It's surprising how successful it is given relatively low immunity among the population and how infectious the new variants are. And yet its both unsustainable and will have to be maintained forever. There is currently no plausible path out of the measures.
If you had to choose between a 1% risk of being crippled by COVID, or a 100% risk of living under the strictest lockdown measures your country had for the rest of your life, what would you choose? And the actual risk of long-term consequences is lower.
> On the other side, in some parts of Europe there's a discussion to let the infected go to work
I live in Europe, the "infected" have gone to work since this February just fine. I mean, those that didn't call in sick days out of their own volition.
Here in the Netherlands, it may not be policy, but a large number of people just don't care anymore. People with symptoms like coughing and changing tone of voice are still going to school, work and parties. No one wears masks except for some tourists or other foreigners. When planning an event, not a single moment is thought about COVID.
Broadly similar in CZ - masks aren't anywhere now and I don't anticipate anyone wearing them unless mandated. Even then, I can see a lot of resistance unless they send the police to into public transport and shops to dish out some severe on-the-spot fines. There are also a lot of people I know who have the "oh I have had this weird cough for days, and I feel a bit off ... but it's not covid I did a home test!" followed a few days later with "ok I have covid".
It's a little frustrating, because a bit of painless extra caution now could help avoid something stronger down the line :-/
I wish we (in my case America, but this applies everywhere outside some parts of East Asia really) could just go back to normal but have normal include not going outside, or at least wearing a mask and frequently washing hands when you get the cold...
I don't care anymore because I've eyeballed that on average 5 people are dying per day (1825 per year) [1], and it doesn't seem to be changing. That's less than flu season (which is more like 3000 to 5000 per year). I don't have sources for the flu. I read it somewhere, I might be underestimating or overestimating a bit.
And of course, all those deaths are horrible, and I feel that pain when I contemplate that for a second. But in my day to day life, I don't see why I'd need to change my behavior.
I am a bit worried about the effects of long Covid for people, but IMO I feel like I need to choose the lesser between two evils which is:
1. Do I lock myself down for 2 years, and fight preventing long Covid and 2% deaths population wide?
2. Do I lock myself down for 5 years, and fight preventing reduced long Covid and 0.15% deaths population wide?
The choices are written down simplified. If you think that there's hindsight bias, there's some but a lot less than you think. I was 2 to 3 weeks ahead of the Dutch government at any point in time. I've been able to protect all the people I care about. For example, my grandparents/parents never caught Covid when there was no vaccine (I was tracking Covid since mid Feb 2022 as a potential threat and constantly ran the probabilities). I'm not even sure if my grandparents ever caught it.
Just look at the RIVM site. It's probably higher than you specified, closer to 6-7k average per year, with massive differences.
> on average 5 people are dying per day (1825 per year)
This is a bit of a dishonest comparison. You're looking at the numbers from before the expected peak, since it's still incredibly warm in the Netherlands right now and peaks seem to happen when it gets colder. So it'll probably be closer to 4000 per year.
While that still seems less than the flu, it's important to realize that the most vulnerable people are now getting vaccinated multiple times a year for covid. A lot of people who never got a flu shot are also being vaccinated. Then there's the fact that a lot of people are still distancing more than they used to. There's more work from home, many people still stay home when they have covid, while in the past, many people prided themselves for going to work with the flu.
It's really hard to compare historic flu statistics with current covid statistics, because the way we handle covid is still very different from how we used to handle the flu. Therefore your conclusion is misguided.
Now I really don't care whether you care about covid, but at lease the interpretation of the statistics should be correct and you missed a ton of details.
> 1. Do I lock myself down for 2 years, and fight preventing long Covid and 2% deaths population wide?
It was never as high as 2% in the first place. The numbers were inflated because we didn't have enough tests to go around, so only the people who we were already pretty sure were infected were tested.
>I am a bit worried about the effects of long Covid for people,
Personal observation ( which contracts established 'science' ). There were always some 'long' aspects of all diseases including for colds/coughs/flu/tuberculosis etc. Nothing special with 'covid'.
The problem with the "just a short lockdown" approach is that there is no endgame. As soon as you stop the lockdowns you're back to square one very quickly unless you take extremely drastical measures like China does. This would involve extreme travel restrictions to/from any place that doesn't take a similar approach.
You'll live in the park forever. Forcefully made to ride the rides everyday to keep up the Disney spirit and getting the same Mickey shaped burger each day as the mascots slowly spiral into demented depression.
COVID has taught me a lot about the cultural differences between the west and China.
A friend of mine worked in China for many years, but after several months of being locked in their apartment block and tested every 72 hours they chose to leave China.
I honestly couldn't imagine people in the West putting up with that, however I'm yet to fully understand why Chinese people continue to suffer the rules without riot.
The vast majority of Chinese people have no option but to continue to suffer the rules, although not a few are speaking up despite the likely consequences:
Other than the money leaving the country, would those leaving essentially be the grease on the squeaky wheel? If they have the financial freedom to have the courage to speak out, but then use that financial position to GTFO, that essentially helps the CCP as there's a much lower volume of opposition.
Such is the dilemma of living or leaving a dictatorship. Also, it's one thing to stand on the barricades and risk prison when you're young and single, but it's a whole different level when you have family and you know the CCP will not hesitate to use them as pawns. (In Xinjiang, it's all too common for parents to get sent to reeducation camps, and the children end up in orphanages.)
This will probably be an unpopular position, but I think some things are a matter of settled strategic win. The CCP has won. You shouldn't fight a battle which results in your meaningless destruction. The CCP can only have a semblance of vulnerability if it terribly mismanages China, and so far it seems to be rather competent.
You invented some weird strawman about how great China is and that's why they need to lockdown (1.2 Billion people or something). I'm pointing out that the reason they're locking down is because their science sucks and as a result the vaccine doesn't work, so Covid is still a thing there when it isn't in the West because we have working vaccines and also a lot of people with natural immunity.
PRC vaccines work about as well as western ones in preventing serious cases, which is to say western vaccines suck as much as PRC vaccines post delta when they couldn't do the one thing that distinguished themselves - preventing spread (which from recent Pfizer drama they didn't even test for so mRNA was... never substantially superior). Hence the entire narrative around superior mRNA wank is ridiculous considering how little benefits it has especially with extra cold chain requirements or just the geopolitics of trusting unreliable foreign govs.
Combine with west being systemically incapable of containing covid and PRC still left with only obvious choice of exercising superior state capcity to zero covid which prevents millions of deaths using stats of mRNA effectiveness in neighbouring east Asian countries. They're still locking down because state capacity > science, including the wests. Plenty of people are still dying from covid every week while 1/5 has long covid. Capitulating to living with covid due to lack of choice =/= covid's over.
The scope of Science has been set by private capital, but the Chinese lockdown is very clearly a scientific endeavor. Might as well compare vaccines vs. lockdown as two scientifically-informed tactics, although the two aren't mutually exclusive, as in the case of China.
Much more interesting to follow live stories rather than throw around Adrian Zenz's crumbs years later. Here's the ongoing protest I was referring to, where "shattered lives" is a bruised back or (worse) the imaginary threat of becoming proletarian: https://www.cnn.com/2022/07/10/china/china-henan-bank-deposi...
> All I am seeing on HN are people being careful to not offend, but at some point it stops being "cultural differences".
That's exactly my problem, too. Thankfully, someone in the replies to the tweet you sent finishes his sentence without ellipses. "Which is more sad: that they are locked up, or that they allow themselves to be locked up?" But this time he hides behind the rhetorical question mark! Just say the two things already: "Chinese people are docile and weak" and "Chinese people are evil, greedy liars." Let's just skip right to the Myth of the Jew. I just want people to take their beliefs seriously instead of hiding behind vague gestures and "fill in the blanks."
> "Chinese people are docile and weak" and "Chinese people are evil, greedy liars."
No one is saying Chinese people are evil. My advice to you would be to stop making strawmans like this, that's not what people mean when they expose these atrocities. The CCP is the problem here and the authorities that are expunging basic civil rights in the name of COVID needs to be condemned. COVID is an excuse to control the population under the banner of 'zero-COVID policy'. You can't imprison a person forcibly in a 8x8 ft tent on top of a mountain for COVID isolation and explain away as "cultural differences". No one wants this shit, not the Chinese people.
That's right. So the "cultural difference" you were referring to is the capacity to commit horrendous atrocities against basic civil rights that the West is too benevolent to grasp. You just used the words "expunging basic civil rights" and "atrocities" instead of "evil." You're one step further in the logical progression than the people you were annoyed with in your first reply to me.
This unfolding progression is why we cannot take people at face value about what they "really mean." People don't know what they mean! See below: "I honestly couldn't imagine people in the West putting up with that, however I'm yet to fully understand why Chinese people continue to suffer the rules without riot." See? They don't understand it. Why not? What is being repressed, that their conscious could form these highly abstract and grammatically correct sentences, but yet they don't know from whence they came?
Well one difference with where I live is that we don’t jail doctors for trying to alert people of a new virus. We also get free elections that allows us to boot officials if they apply unpopular policies.
I'm commenting based on the direct remark made to me recently by one of the admins of this site, after I had also made some ideological/political comments, take it up with them (with the site admins, that is).
In a culture that values doing what's best for the people as a whole, I can imagine people seeing it as a duty rather than in infringment of their individual rights.
I can also see those people struggling to understand the American style of fierce individualism that creates so much pain and interpersonal conflict for seemingly little gain.
Individualism versus collective good seems to be mostly a false dichotomy.
I can also see those people struggling to understand the American style of fierce individualism that creates so much pain and interpersonal conflict for seemingly little gain.
Fierce individualism in some aspect, maybe. But don't forget that the state is extremely powerful in enforcing and reinforcing certain patterns of living.
The cultural differences wouldn't display by leaving of your friend :) there's so much more than "obedience".
They do not riot, because they, too, understand, that the capacity of hospitals is quite low comparable to the density of people.
The other points:
You can't just leave the country without being a foreigner. Chinese people need a Visa for the countries they want to enter.
The social score / if you participate in riots, you for sure will get identified.
The fear being hurt.
No other possibility, because the Chinese officials are really hard in that terms and they don't care if one get hurt.
No other possibility, because the doors are locked by the officials. No one can go to riot.
They use an app to track one's location and track whether one's in "red area". If so, you lose. Everyone have this app. Without app you can't even buy things on the market.
And of course, the CCP. They have a high membership rate. You can't do some jobs like teacher/professor without being a CCP member. So, they're full on the line of party, because they really believe in that. My exgirlfriend entered the party on her 18th, because her father was a doctor at a military hospital.
Being a non member gives you some disadvantages in some parts of live (indirectly, but there are some).
So, you have to speak the language (me do) and have to have lived there for a while (me did) to understand why they're doing it and why they're is not much withstanding of the people.
One of my girlfriends (haha) just arrived two weeks ago in europe. She says it's crazy over there. No end of the 0-covid in sight... Her flight was cancelled 8h before flight because of lockdown of the airport. She had to rebuy the tickets, go to Shanghai and start off there.. But she does not criticize or get angry when talking about this. Her family is still there. She is just happy to be in Europe, because of me and main purpose studying - not because of the measures.
Maybe it's just something about being an American, but even while I was in the Army I had a "fuck you" attitude about most everything that the brass (i.e. the leadership, if "brass" doesn't translate) made us do. Now that I'm a "civilian" again I still retain this attitude. A lot of important business leaders do too. I'm not really sure if this is a feature of American culture or not, but it's certainly a truism that has existed for a loooooong time.
I share that "fuck authority" idea with you, but I think it's important to remember that the context you grow up is very important in setting cultural norms. In many ways, even the things it's possible for someone to believe are based on socioeconomic circumstances.
If you're blasted with propaganda constantly, if the means and mode of productions are set up in a certain way which encourages certain behaviour, it becomes very difficult for people to even realise there are other possibilities.
This is a feature of every society, including in the West. We have a strong individualist "fuck you, I've got mine" tendency, but just like China and Russia, there is a large portion of the population that also lauds the people who exploit us because they are seen as something to aspire to.
Don't get me wrong, I'd rather live in the West, but personally I see many similarities when you look at the life of an average person.
I meant no disrespect to other cultures with my comment.
I agree with this point:
> We have a strong individualist "fuck you, I've got mine" tendency, but just like China and Russia, there is a large portion of the population that also lauds the people who exploit us because they are seen as something to aspire to.
There's a problem when "fuck you" is taken to scale and is the operative means for running a government. It's a hard problem to solve, since I want a responsible and competent republic to maintain a reserve of "fuck you" people because, and let's be honest here, they're the ones who fight wars.
My hypothesis is this attitude is one reason for the US’s economic success.
You can have some immigrant like Elon Musk tweet insults to the president and people complain but nothing happens. You can have companies create new businesses directly in violation of laws (Uber, AirBnB). There are very few sacred cows and we tend to root for the underdog.
From living in Asia, deference plays a big role in social relations - deference to parents, deference to elders and definitely deference to authority/government. And it’s often not for a rational reason but just because “you should respect your elders”.
I hear lots of people say it’s “well they are more group oriented and think about what’s best for everyone” but one look at the piles of trash randomly dropped or people shoving to the front of lines makes me think it’s not that.
It’s more of acceptance that what the government says is how it will be. They’ll bitch about it, happily break rules if they can get away with it, but if the government comes in and says “dont do that or you’ll be punished” they won’t push back and will defer to the governments authority.
Main reason is family first. The ccp will threaten your loved ones, if you do not comply. And family is all you got to rely on, as social network, as thrustworthy people, as pension plan, as everything in a culture optimized to pitch man vs man.
Its a mob, threatening the citizens. All the cultural factors amplify the mobs power, and no nobody believes the texts of the ccp. Its just that the don is always right.
On hospital beds, is the variant going on right now still omicron? The likelihood of such mild variant overwhelming the country's capacity is fairly low.
Americans riot because their protected right to riot is so inculcated in them since birth that they do not really even think that it's a matter of perspective.
Americans empirically do have the right to riot. Almost nobody involved in the 2020 BLM riots suffered any legal consequence from it, and short of the people who actually did things like steal Nancy Pelosi's laptop, most of the Jan6 people will get off scot free as well.
AFAIK they need to lock down because their vaccine is shit. It kinda works for the younger people (around 70% efficiency compared to 90++ of the MRNA ones), but it does really bad for the most vulnerable population (80+ year olds). They either lock down or have tens of millions of deaths.
Xi said that they will end lockdowns in 2024, the same year they will come out with their MRNA vaccines. I dont know why they arent buying western vaccines though. Trade restrictions? Xi's pride?
Fosun (a company in the PRC) [1] has a license for manufacturing of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine [2], so I have been puzzled for well over a year as to why it is not deployed. The few channels I have into the PRC keeps telling me that there is also a general unwillingness to vaccinate among the population (but no clear reason as to why). In general, I remain perplexed as to how the PRC can enforce the strictest lockdowns in the world; yet apparently be completely inept at getting the population vaccinated, when countries such as Japan has never had any lockdowns and never mandated vaccinations and are now doing seemingly far better. I just want to know what piece of the puzzle I am missing.
Indeed, it's a bit puzzling. In Hong Kong, people could freely choose between Sinovac and Comirnaty ("Pfizer" for most in the West, but "Fosun-BioNTech" to those in Hong Kong), both were widely available during the main vaccination drive. Roughly half choose Sinovac, anecdotally due to scare stories on social media at the time about the "experimental, unproven" mRNA tech vs the "traditional, tried and tested" inactivated virus tech of Sinovac.
The biggest COVID problem in Hong Kong (and also to a large extend in China) I gather is that the vaccination rate among the elderly was the lowest, which is a reversal from most other countries. That creates huge problems for hospitals, as the elderly are massively over-represented in COVID hospitalisations. It's not completely known why the elderly vaccination rate is relatively low, but I suspect misinformation and conspiracy stories (which proliferate just as much on the Chinese social media platforms as here on Facebook) is a significant contributor.
> I dont know why they arent buying western vaccines though.
2 reasons.
1) Because while they bought MRNA vaccines for themselves (top CCP officials) they want their own local made vaccines to appear good. In China when you have vaccines for kids and such, people who have money pay to use western versions of the vaccines, while those who can't afford use the free local ones. This is mainly due to the issues with fake vaccines in the past.
2) Xi and the CCP are trying to save face, they cannot admit to the number of cases, deaths, or that zero covid is hurting the economy and failing spectacularly. They have spent 3 years trying to convince the world they were right and that they are the success story while everyone else is a failure.
Internally they have the benefit of controlling 100% of the media so they can control the narrative. But videos and such leak out of China and those can't be scrubbed, they rely on the spreading of their own propaganda on Twitter and Youtube to discredit anyone who talks negatively about China. Any video that shows a door being welded shut with people inside, or a person being put in a box, or dogs being killed in the streets, this is all "western propaganda". It sucks that the CCP giving China a bad name when majority of people there just want to live their lives and are good people.
Xi's project was Xiongan New Area and its an epic failure. Essentially his baby, is slowly being swept under the rug and pretending it doesn't exist. Since 100% of the media in China is state owned and controlled, when things fail like this they just pretend its either going well or it never happened.
> A friend of mine worked in China for many years, but after several months of being locked in their apartment block and tested every 72 hours they chose to leave China.
Had a co-worker who also moved back to Singapore after spending many years living in Shanghai. They gave her 4 eggs and a bag of lettuce to last for 1 week, thankfully the apartment block she lived in had a person sneak in every few days with groceries for the building because the local authories didn't care. Being woken up at 5am daily for mandatory testing.
Another factor to understand is that China has a foundational myth which influences behaviour. Essentially the idea is not to rock the boat because history shows so much pain and bloodshed in the founding of the country.
A demonstration risks not only destabilision of this myth, it risks bloodshed and massacres because stability was won after so much pain.
To be Chinese in a certain way is to work against chaos. As much as to be British is to maintain the dignity of individual persons.
It's kind of hard to find a western equivalent which uses the hard lessons of history. Maybe something like the rule of law?
Two years ago, I would have thought people here in Québec wouldn't put up with 7pm curfews and vaccination passes to access walmart, yet they did, and they even cheered for it. So I would be cautious about assuming an intrinsic difference in how resistant/tolerant we are to authoritarian hysteria.
The government here even outwardly admitted that there was no scientific proof or support for curfews, and yet nothing happened, and they just got re-elected a month ago with a crushing majority.
Also, Apple: Chinese workers flee Covid lockdown at iPhone factory https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-63447755 . Elsewhere in India, Apple is up its game. India's Tata to add Up to 45,000 woman workers at iPhone parts plant to deal with the shortage of parts created by zero lockdown policy https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-11-01/india-s-t... . More and more stuff is moving to other parts of Asia. So how long can China keep up with this zero policy as factories move production elsewhere? According to Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_lockdowns#Variation_b...), a few countries and territories did not use the lockdown strategy at all: including Japan, Belarus, Sweden, South Korea, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Tanzania, two states in Brazil and certain United States states. There are so many lessons to learn from this pandemic, and I hope future generations of Earth have fewer troubles dealing with deadly pandemics.
Lockdown may be a temporary solution. The long-term solution is to maintain better hygiene (masks, washing hands) and get the vaccine without turning into political drama all over Twitter.
I always thought the pandemic will make fist bumps or other forms of greetings “mainstream”. But everyone (I know) have reverted back to hand shakes. I guessing the same with Covid hygiene measures.
> get the vaccine without turning into political drama all over Twitter.
Like the majority of the people not taking the vaccine are on Twitter or do so because of social media drama.
Some people here in HN said that the pandemic would normalise using masks - the way things are now every time I see someone wearing a mask I can’t help but think that they are ill and infectious; it’s very very rare.
Huh. Weird, it's definitely moved the overton window a ton where I am and I'm glad of it. It's totally normal and nobody cares one way or the other as far as I've noticed. It's nice to be able to mask up without any feeling of stigma about it. Masking up just sort of seems like the altruistic move on public transit and the like, this was true before covid, esp during flu season, and I always felt a little embarrassed for our society that it wasn't considered normal.
It takes a special kind of person to cover half their face with a dirty mask and make it harder for themselves to breathe just so they don’t catch a cold.
Compare that to East Asia, where wearing a mask during Flu season was a common thing to prevent your own disease to spread to others long before Covid was known (I've seen sources claiming they started doing so after the Spanish Flu).
Of course, we cannot expect us Westerners to have that level of compassion and common sense.
The people I know who still wear masks and myself wear them so that others don't get our cold, not necessarily to protect ourselves. A form of respect towards co-workers etc.
Yes. Unfortunately it hasn’t stuck in Australia either. Back to people coughing all over everything out in public. I cannot remember a time as an adult where I have had so few sick days over a 3 year span. Guess that’s over now.
I noticed this as well, yes. I travel by train and the amount of people who sound sick is astonishing, lots of coworkers were sick in the last couple of weeks. Didn't get me yet, touch wood.
It seems to have stuck slightly better in WA than the rest of Australia, possibly because we had the rapid return to moderate normalcy (with a border closure) and thanks to the prolonged border closure we basically got a 12+ month crash course in several levels of public responsibility. We had occasional mini lockdowns in between to keep untracked community spread at zero until the public health teams worked out the time was right between vaccination levels, delta spreading , etc.
While it’s not a majority of people, I still routinely see people wearing masks out and about, particularly on public transport. But I suspect it’s primarily as a defence against other peoples germs. Which I’ll admit is why I’m currently looking at nicer less “hospital” masks, notably a few companies that make respirators had a mini boom and diversified into “everyday wear” models that didn’t look like you were fumigating for termites. There are reusable respirators that just look like nicer disposable ones now.
It’s also helps that people don’t find it as weird if you have a mask on when riding a bike since that’s been sort of a normal look for a while, pioneered by both the Lycra wearing enthusiasts and the boom in bike couriers thanks to food delivery apps and no one riding as a courier wants to breath car and truck fumes all day.
Surgical masks are enough to help prevent the spread of COVID, it's not about 100% safety which is impossible, but saying that they're not good enough does not seem to be true.
I just got a phone message reminder from my County health department emphasizing getting the booster. It’s motivating me to go ahead and put it on my priority list, at my specialist center there are a ton of cancer patients and the masks are now stated as mandatory for all. Not enforced but still, it’s posted.
I thought masks were the clearest indicator of a person’s perspective on themselves and their role in society: the same ones who complain about their rights being oppressed are the ones who get the most upset with people like me who take them at their word and then suddenly discover hypocrisy at the core.
I’m so glad we had this moment for people to show their true selves in such a simple fashion. Not as easy as the “Insane” hand stamp that Homer Simpson got (“why won’t this wash off?!?!”) but it’s nature at work again. See bright color snake or reptile? Likely poisonous as a defense mechanism. See a human with dyed hair and a bunch of metal shit in their face? Different kind of poisonous but still there. No mask during peak time = asshole.
The same kind of asshole that doesn’t put their shopping cart / trolley back in the corral. Yes, those people are assholes. If you’re that lazy, reader, stop acting like an asshole.
Hope you have a living will or your own respirator on standby, cuz your attitude is going to mandate in the long run you’re in the “didn’t give a shit then, so we don’t give a shit now” pile. It’s called a hospital.
A very, very close friend was saved by NYC EMTs and Doctors and from that experience career changed into a full RN now on a cardiac ward in Ohio. He’s super high risk and excerpt from COVID work thankfully. It was a hard job at first, watching 50% of patients die because what brought them in was too late to fix. Game over.
When COVID hit he told me stories of how many middle America reasonable people were in denial as it was killing them in beds. They fought until the end. The worst ones realized they fucked up and would pay for it and with no friends or family on the way out. Fuckin brutal, death in cold sterile isolation with yourself to blame. Intellectual suicide.
It will never be the way it was ever again, because our society is broken because people like you care more about the wrong shit than you can admit, and politely, don’t wear a mask, fully inhale on that helium tank to entertain your friends with a funny voice at your next party.
>See a human with dyed hair and a bunch of metal shit in their face? Different kind of poisonous but still there.
Fascinating. Can you elaborate on why they're poisonous?
I recently caught Covid for the first time, and even though it was a fairly mild version of the symptoms, I don't want to that happen again... If I'm in crowded situations, I'll be wearing a mask for a while again. It's just self-protection.
IDK. I've been traveling recently for work and am surprised how many masks I see on airplanes and in airports. I think it has been normalized for anyone who wants to wear one.
Not only that, unless you constantly change gloves they provide little protection since you can still touch multiple people and touch your face with gloves on.
There's yet to be a single well-documented case of someone catching COVID via surface contamination, let alone enough to justify putting a lot of effort into, say, sanitizing your grocery bags.
Thoroughly washing hands regularly is one of the one behavior I kept after the pandemic.
I'm aware that fomites are not the main cause (or even a cause at all) that the disease spreads. Nevertheless, proper hand hygiene seems to be a good idea to me.
> I always thought the pandemic will make fist bumps or other forms of greetings “mainstream”. But everyone (I know) have reverted back to hand shakes.
I thought that the pandemic would make sneezing and coughing into your hands passé, but I still see plenty of people doing exactly that.
Of course the risk-averse would not be satisfied with "pretty low risk" and can still refuse handshakes. I remember reading that for someone to give you Covid through a handshake, they'd have to cough into their hand, shake your hand, and you'd have to put your hand close to your mouth/nose soon after that.
The Chinese government were reporting virus samples found on surfaces after 3 days, but these were tiny samples, tiny viral loads won't harm us.
Indoor masking is also not 100%, you can't smell Covid but you can smell cigarette smoke, I think an appropriate analogy is, if someone's been exhaling their cigarette-smoke-laden breath into a room for 30 minutes, and you walked into that room, would you smell the cigarette? Even with a Covid mask?
> Lockdown may be a temporary solution. The long-term solution is to maintain better hygiene (masks, washing hands) and get the vaccine without turning into political drama all over Twitter.
Outside of China, how many countries continued a lockdown solution after vaccines became widely available (in that country)? Some countries at least pursued split lockdowns where vaccinated people were completely free.
Which was controversial in my country from the onset, and which has recently become even more controversial when it was revealed that Pfizer didn't actually test for transmission prevention in their product.
Not trying to shoehorn this discussion into politics, but the movement pushing back against lockdowns and forced/semi-forced vaccination isn't composed entirely out of anti-vaxxers or conspiracy nuts.
> Which was controversial in my country from the onset, and which has recently become even more controversial when it was revealed that Pfizer didn't actually test for transmission prevention in their product.
I'm quite sure it's always going to be controversial to enforce a lockdown, no matter what country you're in. In some countries the controversy will be whispered because it cannot be shouted, but it doesn't make it less controversial.
Still, if the only goal of the lockdowns was to keep the health system from collapsing, and the vaccines effectively reduced the health problems associated with infection, then a relatively relaxed attitude about infection amongst vaccinated individuals is completely consistent with my implicit claim, here made explicit: that the lessons my original PP alleged we learnt so we could do better next time are exactly what we came up with in the height of the pandemic. Yet it was extremely divisive and destructive of social unity. I honestly doubt most democratic/responsible countries could do the same thing if another pandemic came out in five years time - even the same leaders would make different decisions. If the lesson is "what we did was the best we could do", then that just isn't good enough.
> and which has recently become even more controversial when it was revealed that Pfizer didn't actually test for transmission prevention in their product.
Now imagine how frustrated I've been for nearly two years on this: I knew this in Dec 2020. Pfizer never lied here, and we knew for a month or two after the vaccines were announced that this was the case. The lie came from media and politicians months after the vaccine was announced.
i've heard that sinovac vaccine for covid wasnt as effective as mrna ones, and that may be a reason they are still doing lockdowns.. they may not have much of a choice
This is utter bullshit, if you read the data three doses of Sinovac is as effective as mRNA. I live in HK and have been vaccinated with three doses of Sinovac. My wife has been vaccinated with three doses of Pfizer. We caught COVID two weeks ago. My symptoms were a lot milder and tested negative after five days. She caught COVID off me and her symptoms were a lot worse and she only tested negative after 8 days. Annecdotal but I can tell you Sinovac is effective.
They just can't convince enough of their elderly to take the vaccine, so they have to choose between continuing the lockdowns or letting a large chunk of their elderly population die out of anti-vax stubbornness.
In the trolley problem of deciding between screwing up life for everyone versus having some people die because they chose not to get a vaccine, that doesn’t seem like a close call to me.
Lockdowns certainly can stop geometric rise of an infection and it can make sense if you don't want to have people who might have been saved dying in hospital corridors due to lack of capacity but IMHO it doesn't make any sense whatsoever as a long term solution if the lockdown is not globally coordinated to eradicate the microbe at once. If the lockdown is not global, it will keep coming back.
That's why I wonder what China is trying to achieve here. Are they trying to get rid of any foreign dependence under the pretext of health concerns? Turkey's Erdogan did something like that with their stock exchange, i.e. pushing out foreign capital let Erdogan do economically ridiculous things without having international pushback.
> That's why I wonder what China is trying to achieve here.
Most likely explanation: Population/unrest control. If you can randomly shut down parts of the country for the pretend reason of a plague, you can stop unrest from rising. Do shut down small areas randomly for maximum fear and effect.
Perhaps the authority was concerned the unproductive unrest would go down like Libya, Syria, Egypt, Ukraine without and endstate better than how things were before the young and impressionable took to the street.
Sorry dude, one can't simply tell truth here. Your downvoters shall persist with their cognitive dissonance until they find themselves literally l̶o̶c̶k̶e̶d̶ self-isolated in t̶h̶e̶ ̶c̶e̶l̶l̶s̶ ̶o̶f̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶M̶a̶t̶r̶i̶x̶ their cosy appartments f̶e̶e̶d̶i̶n̶g̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶M̶a̶c̶h̶i̶n̶e̶ signalling their virtue, and even then they will pretend it's OK and everyone dissident is just nuts.
It's simply zero covid working better than the best vaccines which will still lead to millions of deaths at PRC scale and with PRC's relatively lower per capita medical infra. Economically it sucks, but despite disruptions PRC exports booming and moving up the value chain until global slowdown due to UKR war, while being huge producer + cheap RU energy + reserves = slower growth + low inflation, and PRC is still doing relatively alright simply because most others are doing so shit. I imagine not even CCP knows how it ends long term except currently the cost benefit of waiting is worth it, especially with unknowns like long covid, or possibly useful excuse for impending global slow down that's going to impact PRC economy anyway. Might as well as weather it under guise of saving lives. TLDR is it's still sustainable status quo.
>It's simply zero covid working better than the best vaccines
Based on one metric. But ultimately it's self defeating. If you flush the economy down the toilet then there isn't the money for clean water, or hospitals etc.
Further zero flu works better than the vaccine. Do you want to stop the world until every disease is eradicated.
Lockdowns were never sustainable, in the context of a modern economy. It's a question of the least worst option. Vaccines mean it's no longer the least worst option.
> Vaccines mean it's no longer the least worst option.
Millions of dead, and 100s of millions taken out of workforce for ~2 weeks during infection, possibly multiple times, possibly with long covid effects for years after, or we're coming up on winter where immunity weakest. It's far from clear vaccines isn't the worst option short term (0-3 years).
>flush the economy down the toilet
I mean sure? Except with confluence of global factors PRC economy, while underperforming is still outperforming most of western countries, as stated above. Hence status quo is currently sustainable, there is less pressure to deliver economically when everyone else is sinking. Obviously sustainable not long term, but I can easily see another year or two, especially with global slow down. The broader point being, all the western MSM reporting on PRC wrecking itself economically is avoiding the fact that it's not wrecking itself as much as most developing countries with RU sanctions, or dealing with US dollar, and US dealing with end of cheap money. Zero covid + three red lines on real estate + tech crack down, etc all deliberate policy choices are not as devasting as 10% inflation or end of cheap credit causing housing sales + tech valuations to crash like in PRC. It's not world ending, PRC is collapsing stuff.
>Do you want to stop the world until every disease is eradicated
No I think PRC wants to stop this specific disease that has demonstrably kills many people with linger side effects even in wealthy countries with access to better health care.
E: posting rate limited so @benj111
>So I don't even know what figures you are working with
Studies conservatively extrapolating TW/SKR post living with covid + mRNA numbers to PRC with modifier for lower per capital med care access. I don't know what figures you are working with to conclude ~3M would get covid when it will be 100s of millions since no vaccine prevent spread and majority of pop have no natural immunity. Estimates from scientists who actually crunched the numbers: a few million dead, significant % of which due to overhelming hospital infra.
1. Millions of dead (conservative estimate is ~2+) is still factually a lot of dead to deal with. If that can be avoided with accepted costs (which I'm arguing, currently is) then why not.
2. It's worse in that it comes with millions of dead bodies and at least 10s of millions long covid. Maybe zero covid is sunk cost and those figures are inevitable, but still no compelling reason for lifting short term.
3. Covid = flu? Are linger side effects of flu as well understood as covid? Annual influenza deaths is fraction of covid deaths. Extrapolating from US annual flu deaths, in PRC, influenza would kill ~100,000 per year vs again millions of covid deaths in same period. Like if PRC can get away with only 500k hospitalizations, Xi could personally go smother each covid ICU patient and still spin it as a win.
>Millions of dead, and 100s of millions taken out of workforce for ~2 weeks during infection, possibly multiple times, possibly with long covid effects for years after
1. In a country of billions, 'millions' could mean fractions of a percent. 'millions' in this context is just emotive rather than factual.
2. What do you mean taken out of the workforce? From illness? That sound wrong. From isolating? How is that worse than it Chinese status quo?
>No I think PRC wants to stop this specific disease that has demonstrably kills many people with linger side effects even in wealthy countries with access to better health care.
Which is why I specifically gave the example of flu. A disease that kills and has lingering side effects. A disease that we live with currently.
Millions of people in China probably due from flu every year. Which incidentally shows how flawed your use of the figure is.
From what I can work out ~3m people would be expected to get covid in China if they were all vaccinated. ~500k would be hospitalised. And ~70k would develop long covid lasting at least 6 months. So I don't even know what figures you are working with.
>We saw that 2,394 and 187 people tested positive for COVID-19 more than two >weeks after their first and second jabs, respectively, with the chances of ?>becoming infected falling as time passed.
>That’s the equivalent of one in 500 (0.2%) and one in 3,333 (0.03%)
1,400,000,000 x 0.002 = 2,800,000
(Note I actually misinterpretted this as applying to 2 different vaccines, of which I chose the least effective, whereas this is after just 1 jab.)
based on double jab figures the figure would be around 0.5 million.
>Reassuringly, only 104 people in the vaccinated group who tested positive for COVID-19 ended up in hospital (one in 2,500 or 0.04%).
>13.3% at one month or longer after infection
>2.5% at three months or longer, based on self-reporting
>More than 30% at 6 months among patients who were hospitalized
2,800,000 x 0.025 = 70,000 (although this is based on the single jabbed figure, fully jabbed the figure would be 1400.
>when it will be 100s of millions since no vaccine prevent spread
Are you saying the vaccine doesn't stop you getting covid? that is false. It doesn't stop it 100% but it is significant, significant enough that outbreaks can die off on their own. Further i'm not sure if thats even relevant, the issue is how many it kills. its easy to get a cold, you don't need to worry about getting a cold because that won't kill you. so the relevant factor is how good is the vaccine at preventing major illness and hospitalisation.
vaccines lower risk of infection by 60% - 80%
vaccines lower the risk of symptomatic disease by 65% - 90%
vaccines lower risk of hospitalisation by 90%
vaccines lower risk of death by over 90%
Rather than doing napkin math using sources like joinzoe, i.e. self report (app) on population with high natural immunity due to uncontrolled spread, with great health care infra, and low population density - many factors why that's a bad place to start your reason chain - here's earlier study by epidemologists who are familiar with PRC conditions.
> lift such measures could see more than 112 million symptomatic cases of Covid-19, five million hospitalisations, and 1.55 million deaths.
There's also later analysis that extrapolates with TW/SKR numbers after they began living with covid with IIRC greater deaths. These are fellow East Asian examples with more simliar conditions than PRC except they have much better per capita health care infra.
>relevant factor is how good is the vaccine at preventing major illness and hospitalisation.
Yes and the relevant factor to that relevant factor is PRC doesn't have the ICU beds / hospital infra per capita to absorb even vaxed spread. Most of country is old and underdeveloped and "crushing the curve" is still the best path. Vax prevents severe cases but at PRC scale and infectiousness of omicron, in dense urban enviroments during colder seasons, that's still more symptomatic severe cases than the medical system can handle.
>We find that the level of immunity induced by the March 2022 vaccination campaign would be insufficient to prevent an Omicron wave that would result in exceeding critical care capacity with a projected intensive care unit peak demand of 15.6 times the existing capacity
That's the crux of the issue, PRC is a developing country with low hospital beds per capita that demographically skews old (and antivax). These factors means PRC is better off with no vaccines and zero covid than vaccines and living with covid until zero covid or some other factor makes zero covid unsustainble.
> It's simply zero covid working better than the best vaccines which will still lead to millions of deaths at PRC scale and with PRC's relatively lower per capita medical infra.
If China was able to logistically handle zero covid, I would be more inclined to agree with you. However, each time a city in China has been locked down, it has been a logistical disaster that almost always resulted in:
- extremely poor quarantine zones in unsanitary conditions (which defeats the purpose of being free of disease). This includes many people who were lucky enough to quarantine in their own homes as even their pets are not allowed to leave, they need to dedicate spaces in their home for their animals to defecate.
- lack of basic necessities; food, heating, water leakage, insect problems, or even lacking a proper indoor building in some cases.
- a lack of professionalism, discipline, or even respect of human decency among the staff. Attaching spikes to entrances to keep people from leaving by force, refusing to allow elderly access to medical care, threatening people with weapons, security bao'ans going on China social media laughing about all the new found power and control they have over the populace, beating people in a show of their power trips.
- questionable policies, such as requiring everyone in a community to come together, line up, for a covid test, which increases the likelihood of getting covid, rather than go door to door.
This has lead to more than just inconveniences, it's lead to death. Which is supposedly the very thing this is all supposed to avoid. The Chinese state has proven by experience, repeatedly, that it cannot logistically handle these strict policies. It is a failure of the zero covid policy and a failure of the Chinese Communist Party to administer its State in a competent manner.
Seeing as we are almost 12+ months post delta/omicron and local outbreaks have consistently been contained to prevent uncontrolled geometric spread, yes PRC is logistically handling zero covid. Over many lock downs, of various sizes, across different regions, to keep spread at so-far managable levels.
> logistical disaster / always resulted in / it's lead to death
Of course, it's not a smooth 5star process, shutting down urban regions with millions fundmentally can't be. That's not a failure of policy, but acceptable baseline for competent epidemiologic management, competence being it contains spread and saves significantly more lives than it takes. Some pain/death is inevitable operating on the scale of hundreds of millions. The "very thing it's suppose to avoid" is millions of deaths due to uncontrolled spread and overwhelmed medical system, not a hundreds/thousands of incidental deaths because someone peoeple starved/suicided/bus crashed. Same with increasing chance of local spread to prevent higher order spread. Like these aren't exquistily managed bespoke interventions, they're coarse but by now tested methods that can be implemented in a snap. Of course it's not clean, but it's better than health system collapsing. The cost benefit analysis of maintaining zero covid, when one can, and PRC can, is obvious. So obvious that I'd argue they're politically trapped by repeated demonstrating ability to logistically execute zero covid.
If a disease arises with a much higher fatality rate, lockdowns are still pretty much our only tool to deal with it. Eradication or not, we’re not going to survive a 35% IFR virus with business-as-usual plus hand washing and masks. China will locally eradicate it, and here in the US well… I dunno. It’s not looking great.
You understand that with globalization, this makes no sense, right? It will return, again and again. Economic impact of always going into lockdown will be insane. Another reason for western companies to become less dependent on China in the long term, massive reduction in productivity in the short term.
With luck it means we’ll survive a high-IFR virus until vaccines are available, and won’t lose a huge chunk of our population and suffer collapse. China will even have a working economy. In the face of something truly deadly there aren’t good alternatives. China’s unwillingness/inability to switch to a post-vaccine strategy is the error here, not their very successful use of quarantine+lockdown pre-vaccine.
The biggest casualty of covid is the trust in health authorities. Unnecessary lockdowns (assuming those even work which is really not clear given the absence of inflection point in cases when they were introduced in europe) will just lead to even more distrust.
Also high IFR viruses usually have high symptoms. Much easier to contain a disease when you can tell people are sick. People feeling sick will also travel and spread less. What made covid so widespread is that it was so mild to so many people. So there is a kind of bell curve of deadliness vs infectiousness. So not really convinced by those argument of what if covid was so much deadlier. You would need a virus with zero symptom while you are infectious, and then that kills you, like an airborne HIV. Anything is possible but with ifs...
A couple of reasons. First, the strict measures were popular and people demanded them. It's been a while since I've spoken with people in China so I'm not sure how much this is still the case, but it was definitely true up to last year.
Second, the measures allowed most people to move relatively freely and go to discos when we still had blanket lockdowns in the west. The idea was to crackdown hard and quickly create green zones were life was possible almost as before. While that means millions of people on lockdown at a given time, it was likely a small fraction of the total population. (I'd like to see actual numbers here but find them hard to come by TBH).
Third, COVID is special as it is one of the few airborne / aerosol-transmitted diseases that you have a good chanche of supressing. The reason is that it shows overdispersion: most people are only slightly contagious, but few people are extremely contagious. (Caveat: I think that was the case with SARS, and with the early SARS-COV-2 variants, but I haven't seen data for Omicron.) This means that contact tracing is extremely effective. Most people will have had contact with the same few spreaders, and if you take them out, you can suppress the virus such that it will die out in a population. Western countries borked that up completely. When the incident numbers were really low, we dropped most measures, but that would have been the opportunity to eradicate it with just 1-2 more weeks of social distancing. Asian countries were much more successful with suppression.
Finally, China is a huge country. Most people move around inside, but rarely leave (its a bit like the US in that regard but much more so). To leave as a Chinese citizen you actually need an exit visa. So the majority of people are not bothered very much by travel restrictions. The comparatively little cross border traffic you can control by just giving everybody mandatory PCR tests. I could imagine the Borders to north Korea, as well as to Laos/Vietnam might be problematic to control, but AFAIK they are pretty closed up now.
So it makes totally sense to them to continue their strict course. I imagine as soon as a good vaccine becomes available there too (maybe a nasal vaccine that can prevent infection and not just severe cases), they will reevaluate.
Zoonotic spillovers are rare, this is why you probably never heard about corona viruses before 2002/2003 (SARS). The probability is increasing of course because we are detroying animals' habitats. And because we live in a densely interconnected world but can't agree on how to control diseases. We can either work on those problems, or throw the hands up in the air and blame the bats.
SARS-COV-2 combines aspects of HIV, the common cold, and Monsanto-engineered protein sequences, none of which had any chance of coming together in a single organism in the wild in order to combine like this.
I don't think bats are to blame, nor can this be a "simple matter" of zoonotic spillover.
Could it also be the vaccines that were administered in China being less effective? If I recall people were hesitant to get the ones they developed and they at some point admitted that the initial ones had too low of an efficacy. So it'd make sense (for the gov) to fall back to lockdowns, maybe?
Definitely. Unfortunately vaccination is political everywhere and there are also profit interests, so they can't just use the "better" vaccines.
With the mRNA vaccines and the weaker virus variants, we averted a lot of deaths and the "collapse" of the hospitals in many places. But we are still dealing with many dead, millions of work days lost per year, and many cases of long covid...
> First, the strict measures were popular and people demanded them.
How is this determined? A democratic vote....in China? At best, it's tyranny of the majority. The article quoted Xi as saying the people wanted it, but that's not the same thing.
"Videos posted on Chinese social media site Weibo showed people rushing to the park's gates following the announcement but finding them already locked."
It's a great policy to apply to other people. But it seems that they don't want any of it.
The current strains are in between the severities of a cold and the flu. Lockdowns and so forth are ridiculous at this point and have been for at least a year, maybe even 18 months.
From reading scientific papers about the occurrence of complications in people who've had Covid twice, it looks like the virus inflicts long-lasting damage to the body, even if it isn't readily apparent.
People how have Covid twice have a higher rate of complication the second time around (including post-Covid syndrome a.k.a. long covid). There are no reasons to think that people in places where "living with Covid" is a thing really are rotting with it. Vaccines do little to protect against this.
In Europe, the cumulative incidence of confirmed infections is nearing 50% of the population (and ~30% in the US). In China, that number is less than 1%.
Major caveat regarding the reasoning above, the studies were carried before omicron emerged. These variants have fewer complications, not sure how this will compound.
It is possible that the drop in productivity in the US that's been reported this week (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33405389) is in part driven by lower mental acuity or immune system performance. The decline may not be large enough to be noticeable on a day to day basis, yet show up in aggregate measurements.
Xi may be playing the long game here. If the above holds, even if Covid ends up endemic in China after a while, its workers would have an edge on the rest of the world.
It's not year-to-year noise, it's quarter-to-quarter, and there's a seasonal pattern that vanishes if you do year-on-year quarter comparison (see the solid blue line in the bls.gov chart).
The WaPo article only shows the dotted line data from the BLS graph, which is far noisier, but shows two consecutive quarters of decline, which is unusual too.
Lockdowns didn't really do much in europe. Like washing hands it feels more like a placebo treatment to make people feel like the gvt is doing something useful.
Exactly the same as what the western world has tried for 2 years, give or take. It doesn’t work either way, but due to their authoritarian government they just have the ability to keep trying for longer.
The western world made a show of trying, but trying to balance political considerations with covid control is basically impossible. When cases are low, the political pressure to relax restrictions is irresistible, and then R goes above 1, but the political will to do anything about it comes too late to help much.
Frankly I'm surprised that China managed to control Omicron. It's certainly a social-technical feat.
In the end, only time will tell whether the Chinese strategy was a good one for China. Obviously China has paid extreme costs to maintain its policy. It's still unknown what the longer term results to the health of the population will be in other countries will be though.
Ah, clinging to the old fantasy of ‘low R values’, as if somehow that will cause the pandemic to disappear. In reality that outcome will online happen when there are exactly 0 cases left, both in humans and animals, in any country in the world. Spoiler: that’s never going to happen.
The fantasy is a reality in China. It's not necessary to get to zero cases to have a disease simply not be a major problem, similar to Measles in the U.S. In the general population for Measles R<1, so while it pops up from time to time in some poorly vaccinated communities, for the general population that's been vaccinated, it's really not an issue.
The fantasy with COVID was that you'd get R<1 for a period of time until there was a vaccine, and then the vaccine would do all of the work keeping R<1. Unfortunately the COVID vaccine doesn't do that. Hopefully some day we will have one that does that.
Well I don’t know what the mainstream theory was in the US but in the Netherlands it was ‘well if due to our lockdowns R is smaller than 1 the disease will just die down’. Which is obviously nonsensical in a pandemic.
If R is lower than 1, the disease will die down. If it's greater than 1 it will flare up (by definition). China has reached a stage where they have essentially eradicated it within China. They still import cases though into areas where R>1. When that happens, they get a flare up, and then they clamp down with massive testing and, if it gets bad enough, lockdowns, until they eradicate it from that area again.
Now at the beginning, one strategy could have been: get R much lower than 1, and push the disease to near eradication, and then dynamically change anti-covid measures so that R approximately equaled 1, which would entail substantial restrictions, but not a Wuhan or Shanghai style lockdown.
The problem is that riding along at exactly R=1 means any time the seasons change, or there's a new variant, or people's behavior changes, you have to constantly adjust restrictions. Generally it has been shown to be impossible in democracies to get enough people to agree to do this, and it's generally not politically possible to enforce this.
Once the vaccines came out, the hope was always that they would dramatically reduce transmission so that R was much less than 1 and we could treat it like measles, and for a while (mid-2021, pre-Delta) that seemed to be the case, but between waning immunity and Omicron, it turned out that the vaccines were not able to reduce transmission to a great enough degree to make this happen.
The vaccines were tested and approved so scientifically it should have been known before the rollout started that it wouldn’t work. So once the vaccines were approved (December 2020) either we knew all along it wasn’t going to work and the R values theory was just psuedoscientific fraud to get the population to comply, or we didn’t know and the approval process was faulty.
Either way the R values theory was never going to work because there was always going to be a big part of the population (animals, people abroad) that can’t be controlled with lockdowns or vaccine mandates. And that also should have been known.
And lastly, R values theories make for nice, easy to explain pop science, but it’s all statistics with all the downsides: the R value that’s on the news is just a number calculated from limited tests, and those tests can be manipulated. And it’s part of a random process; R>1 doesn’t ‘mean flare ups will occur’. It means the chance is higher that the numbers will go up. But they can also randomly go down.
All interesting for pop science and for making models and reports but a lot less useful for political decisionmaking in the real world.
The vaccines were not approved on the basis that they reduced transmission. This was a widely held hope, given that other vaccines do this, but that wasn't an endpoint of the studies. There was a little bit of data in the Moderna trial that was very encouraging, namely that everyone in the trial took a PCR test at the time of their second dose, and people in the active arm had a much lower positivity rate. There was also a lot of epidemiological evidence for the vaccines dramatically reducing transmission.
The problem is that this data was gathered with a different version of the virus than we have now, and it was gathered with relatively fresh vaccinations. Even pre-Delta, you could see immunity waning leading to increased transmission in Israel. With Omicron, the efficacy of the vaccines is also much less.
That said, from all the evidence we have, the existing vaccines still do reduce transmission, but not enough to prevent epidemic spread. There are a lot of numbers, because every study has a different population and different ways of measuring, but roughly speaking, being vaccinated cuts your risk of contracting and transmitting COVID by something on the order of 50%. That's a lot better than nothing, but COVID is so contagious that it's not enough.
The "R values theory" is perfectly reasonable and almost tautologically correct, and works regardless of an animal reservoir and imported cases from travel. We have the same issue with imported cases with Measles, but hardly anyone gets Measles, because almost everyone is vaccinated, and the R value in the population is much less than 1. If you import a case, that case infects less than 1 person on average, who infects less than 1 person on average, etc, until it dies out. R<<1 doesn't mean you have no cases, it just means that it's self limiting. If you import say, 100 cases a year, maybe that leads to 50 or 100 locally acquired cases total, but for the average person, you don't really have to worry about it. The exception is communities with low vaccination rates. You sometimes see Measles pop up still in the U.S. in religious communities, etc, because R for Measles in those communities is greater than 1 due to the lack of vaccination.
It would be great if COVID and COVID vaccines were like Measles, but unfortunately the vaccine isn't yet good enough.
China's vaccine doesn't work. The zero-COVID policy works to control the spread of SARS-COV-2 and its variants. The policy does not work to control the spread of human misery, unemployment, and general disruption of lives. But the people in government have no ethical framework, and no political consequences requiring they attend to the actual needs of the people governed.
At this point, it is about the appearance of taking action so that the policy decisions of Xi Jinping's government seem correct, not about doing what's effective for the overall health of the system which includes all of the governed in all the variety of their activities and pursuits.
> So how long can China keep up with this zero policy as factories move production elsewhere?
The divestment of China has more reasons than just COVID:
- Wages in China have risen to a point where other countries have an advantage because unchecked capitalism always optimizes for "inefficiency", and labor costs are an immense factor for these extremely large operations
- Western sanctions against China have increased, to a point where Western customers cannot be sure they are not the next ones caught in the crossfire
- China itself has drifted away from their weird "communism plus capitalism with some personal liberty" hybrid under Xi Jinping, who has pretty much cleansed the party of everyone not lined up with his ideology over the last years, additionally large investors have been penalized by the Party in various degrees (e.g. Jack Ma). Foreign investors do not like the prospect of their investment being seized at will by the Party as well, and not everyone can afford the level of influence ultra-corporations like BASF or VW have on their local governments to protect them to some degree from such actions.
- China's internal economy is collapsing as well, adding further insecurity for foreign investors
- Many are scared of the possibility of China snacking themselves off a piece or the whole of Taiwan. The US have a long-standing commitment to defend Taiwan, so it is crystal clear that any such attempt would lead to a full-blown war with all associated costs. Unfortunately, as we've seen with Putin, individual idiocy of dictators can be enough to override common sense.
> Lockdown may be a temporary solution. The long-term solution is to maintain better hygiene (masks, washing hands) and get the vaccine without turning into political drama all over Twitter.
Agreed. The problem with China's COVID policy, however, is not antivaxxers on Twitter - it is that the Chinese vaccines are absolute trash compared to Western vaccines, but Xi Jinping can't really backtrack on his decision to only use domestic vaccines because that would imply he, the half-god, has made an error in judgement.
> Chinese vaccines are absolute trash compared to Western vaccines, but Xi Jinping can't really backtrack on his decision to only use domestic vaccines because that would imply he, the half-god, has made an error in judgement.
The Chinese vaccine was the first vaccine out; and in particular the mRNA vaccine technology was new and unproven. There would be no shame in saying, "We can be proud that Sinovac was the first vaccine approved; it saved millions of lives and allowed us to go back to normal long before anyone else. But now, in the light of the new, more virulent strains of COVID (created in part by decision of the rest of the world not to implement coordinated lockdown strategies), and in the light of the extensive testing of the new mRNA vaccine technology, it makes sense to move on."
At least, there shouldn't be any shame in saying something like that; the shame is only in he heads of the CCP.
This is the political equivalent of a comb-over. People wearing a comb-over look in the mirror and convince themselves that it looks better than just being bald; whereas everyone else can already see that they're bald, and disrespect them more for refusing to accept the fact than they would just pure baldness.
People are stating things imagined by themselves as facts. My imaginary fact is that: China was hoping to have new vaccines for new variants, constantly collecting data, and preparing for ease up of the restrictions.
>Agreed. The problem with China's COVID policy, however, is not antivaxxers on Twitter - it is that the Chinese vaccines are absolute trash compared to Western vaccines, but Xi Jinping can't really backtrack on his decision to only use domestic vaccines because that would imply he, the half-god, has made an error in judgement.
China can't be that absurd can they? That just seems totally crazy to me.
Also China's vaccine isn't that bad, really. And it'd probably be pretty solid with a single MRNA booster.
The question is what is the problem the Chinese government wants to solve?
If they want to limit demonstrations and get even more power over the people, lockdowns and not allowing mRNA based vaccines inside the country is a great tool.
China had heavy lockdowns. Changing the policy could be seen as admitting they made a mistake. There's one party, but multiple factions, and some factions pushed lockdowns harder than others.
I still can't understand it. Even if China were motivated purely by not wanting to make past decisions seem wise, we've had so many reasons to change policy. Vaccines, monoclonals, paxlovid, and now updated vaccines. You may still need lockdowns to manage surges that go over your capacity to treat, but going for zero Covid?
We talk about someone with serious self-confidence and self-esteem issues, he made Winnie the Pooh illegal after all, on his way to become de-facto dictator of China. So yes, I'd say more power over the people is exactly what Chinese leadership wants. That they ruin the economy over it, well, all totalitarian regimes learned that part the hard way sooner or later.
Linking Winnie the Pooh to Xi Ping is not allowed, can we at least agree on that? How unacceptable from me to oversimplify things in short, obviously not researched, online forum comment.
Edit: A chinese resident confirmed that two links into the Quora page linked to above. Quora insists on Facebook or Google for me, so no linking.
> a few countries and territories did not use the lockdown strategy at all: including Japan, Belarus, Sweden, South Korea, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Tanzania, two states in Brazil and certain United States states.
Are you sure Taiwan, South Korea and Hong Kong fit on that list?
Yes, as someone in Taiwan, the borders were closed and needed quarantine, but there was never local lockdowns where massive areas were required to stay home.
one country that doesn't gets mentioned is Pakistan, it has a population of 200m+ with heavily dense cities, there were no lockdowns, people prayed in congregations in Mosques 5 times a day with no social distancing and no masks.
Pakistan is one of the dangerous and dirty places on the planet. I highly doubt they can even reliably count births and deaths. Someone on a podcast I watched recently said he saw doctors reusing syringes after stabbing them into an Irish Spring soap bar. I seriously doubt they even have Covid tests.
The point that people are making here is that all the time we are made to believe that the masks, lockdowns etc are necessary to keep the exponential propagation spiraling out of control
The default talking point and narrative is that even if masks were only 0.1% effective that tiny effect exponentially compounds and over time and leads to <insert massive number here> lives saved.
Then you have Pakistan where no measures are taken yet the there is no exponential spiraling out of control
According research (just google is and look at the actual papers and the data set in them and how it was calculated), with the exception of properly worn high grade medical PPE, neither does masking.
Universal masking is little more than pointless hysterical hype.
Flimsy reused surgical masks, bandanas and home made cloth masks only look f-good in mathematical projections, never in the actual real world results.
No I am not posting research, look at it yourself, the ones posting any benefit come from mannequin head studies and mathematical results based on mathematical models from various lab projections.
Universal masking is actually embarrassingly ineffective.
Properly worn PPE ( like done in hospitals, takes 10 minutes to put on and will leave a mark on your face ) and Hazmats work pretty well though.
The shitty disposable surgical mask from slave labourers in india that you have kept in your pocket for 6 months does fuck all.
Notably the status quo for decades of research pre-covid was that masks don't work ...
Then in 2020 hysteria broke out, most scientists got scared shtless and you could only publish papers that indicate that masks work even though all the empirical evidence around us show that they don't.
If anything shows how short term scientific consensus is trivially falsifiable as it depends on few influential people.
Good luck trying to get a NIH grant with the hypothesis that masks might no be effective ... It is a no-go hypothesis from the start.
This again? The masks are to prevent _you_ from spewing infections agents all over the place. The masks are not to protect you. The masks are intended to protect other people from you.
I could believe this if it was mostly spread by coughing and sneezing and other such large droplets, but we knew by mid/late-2020 that this virus was almost entirely aerosol spread - something cloth masks don't stop at all.
Can we please drop this from COVID discussions? COVID isn’t spread by touch. That was apparent early on, but a lot of energy and resources were still diverted from “things that work” to a cleaning fetish.
COVID's primary means of infection certainly isn't touch, but that doesn't preclude getting the droplets on your hands and introducing them by touching your face.
Has hand washing as a means to reduce disease transmission ever been studied outside of third world countries? I tried to look it up once and the only studies I could find were all in cultures that used their bare hands to clean themselves after defecating.
At that point, it seems kind of obvious that washing your hands reduces disease. But for cultures that have more "advanced" bathroom ritual, is hand washing beyond cleaning literal shit off your hands actually effective? I can't imagine that a person could dedicate enough time to hand washing versus the amount of times they touch things and their faces, to make it a practice with good enough adherence rates to be considered useful policy.
They don't -- they may leave if they show a negative covid test, and one would assume there are testing capabilities on site shortly after the announcement.
Last report is that everyone left by 10:30pm [0]
Don't get me wrong however, I would not appreciate being stuck in such circumstances for multiple hours.
That certainly sounds hectic, but this feels like clickbait. Being delayed by a few hours is pretty typical anywhere you may go with unforeseen circumstances.
Of course it's clickbait. China is bad and therefore we must make things look as ridiculous as possible, and make sure people leave comments (as we're already seeing in this thread) about China treating its citizens like prisoners
I was considering this same point myself this past weekend. Very odd, but I suspect we'll never know unless there's some obviously catastrophic event in the future.
I was thinking more along the lines that it was found that the lab ferrets experienced slow but continuous neural degredation without an end in sight after infection. But you're right, it's not practical society-level to worry about.
Yeah. I was commenting in a thread a few hours ago trying to reason about alcohol's degrading effects on the brain. Also depression and morbid obesity.
I'm still gonna drink alcohol and I'm still going to end up catching some diseases. I'll probably still eat some burgers, too. I'd like to not be a total wreck for doing any of these sorts of things too much.
I've heard ferrets smell kinda bad, but I'd probably still want to pet a brain damaged one.
I feel like we know about all-cause mortality and CE/MFS relabeled long COVID rising in anyone who had COVID, but just choose not to care.
Since there are some promising developments in treating CE/MFS now, I'll continue trying to not get infected, though it is getting less easy with seemingly nobody left to give a shit.
What China knows is that their vaccines are worse than the western ones, too many old people didn't get vaccinated at all and they don't have the hospital capacity to just ride out the infections waves without many deaths.
I very much hope this is what it is. This theory is supported by the notion that massive death waves would supposedly put pressure on the current government.
I have variations of this thought about once a month. The modern CCP is many things, but "wildly incompetent at the national scale, for extended periods of time, at the cost of potentially destroying their own country" is not something I would be quick to label them as.
There is a part of me that thinks that they either know something that we do not about the current disease, or they know something we don't about something that is to come. Maybe they're concerned about working out the kinks of managing a society during a pandemic, with COVID as a trial run. Their level of control seems insane when what we're dealing with is COVID (as far as we know), but what if we're dealing with something worse? Suddenly the civil liberties and laissez faire take of the west is an unimaginable disadvantage.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but "wildly incompetent at the national scale, for extended periods of time, at the cost of potentially destroying their own country" is a pretty accurate summary of the Mao era in China, and Xi has engineered his way into being in precisely the same position of having essentially unlimited power.
It's politically convenient to be able to lock down a part of society for a seemingly valid reason. COVID may be something the Chinese have to live with for longer than expected...
Citation needed. It is one of the possibilities, and the WHO says that there there's no clear winner yet[1]. Admittedly, this is a reversal of previous assessments, where the lab leak theory was all but dismissed entirely.[2]
That report was made by interns in the minority party, aka republican staffers. Its propaganda, not backed by anything at all, and uses a ton of purple language to say that the lab leak is unfalsifiable (aka we cannot say outright it didn't happen) and equate that with "probably happened".
China had extraordinary success with their 0-covid strategy following the first two months of pandemic and were largely unaffected while western countries were struggling with intermittent lockdowns and massive death tolls. It really showed one of the strengths of China's regime and I think it formed a part of their national pride.
It's hard for them to walk back from that now because of how much it contradicts what they've been saying for over 2 years.
I'm honestly really, really confused about what the CCP wants or thinks the end game of this policy will be.
It's patently obviously with Covid quickly becoming or already endemic in the rest of the world that these outbreaks will continue, and likely grow, in China. So are they using this policy just as a tool to show the control they have? At some point of there is enough damage to the economy and damage to individuals that it only increases the likelihood of large scale social unrest.
Every time I see events like this happen, I get extremely skeptical of the idea that China will somehow replace the US as leader of the world. I’m not sure if I’m justified in thinking so, but I just cannot imagine actions like this leading to a creative, innovative culture.
“ In his three-and-a-half-hour political report to the Party’s 2,300 top officials, Xi laid out a vision for China to lead the world in everything from science and technology, to modern weaponry and military might, to providing a model of economic development and governance for other countries to follow.”
The problem is two different meanings of "lead"; one simply means "being in front", like in a race; another means, "Guiding and directing coordination of a large group of people". The first is completely individual; the second is collaborative.
"Leading the world in science and technology" means "having more advanced science and technology than the rest of the world"; and even "providing a model" means, "letting people copy it if they feel like it". That's all completely about China.
When people talking about the US leading the world, it's more about guidance and influence over coordinated action; NATO, climate change, IMF, WHO, etc. That's something China as a country has never been particularly interested in.
Imagine, for instance, China trying to arrange sanctions in response to something. They're not even close to having that kind of influence, and they're not particularly trying.
If I say that I'm not sure how students who live in a climate of fear and need to practice active shooter drills after every school shooting can lead to a creative and innovative culture, do you think that holds?
Better question is do we need creative and innovative culture. It's rather destructive when everyone wants to be a creator and nobody is willing to do hard not-so-fancy jobs. Somebody has to do plumbing and install electricity for all the influnkers and utubers.
Obviously there's a need for a small portion of pioneers. But should society aim for mass creativity or just highlight those who cannot not create.
There's no single leader of the world, it's all about local influence. It has always been and probably will be bipolar. Geographical closeness, and trade and cultural/language export have the most impact.
Report is rather sensationalized like much on the reports from BBC, and does not provide closure on the story.
From another news source (CBS):
"The park closed Monday for testing of staff and visitors, Walt Disney Co. and the government said in separate statements. The city health bureau said guests all tested negative and were allowed to leave by 8:30 p.m., but one visitor from elsewhere in China told the Reuters news agency she didn't make it out until 10 p.m.".
Struggling to understand China’s endgame here. Assuming they achieve zero covid, surely they will be left with a population that is still vulnerable to covid, while the rest of the world (which has largely stopped caring) will have developed immunity the hard way, and therefore China must maintain permanent quarantine/isolation to avoid reintroducing the virus?
I have been puzzled by this too, especially given my general perception of Chinese leadership as highly competent. My best theory is that Chinese people are very paranoid about infectious disease, and that the leadership believes that their political legitimacy would be threatened by mass infection numbers.
I mean, we thought that too about Putin et al, about the UK, and about the US. I think we may need to reexamine our priors about how intelligent our leaders are.
The Chinese government does not care about its people catching covid. It is not about covid but about clamping down. It's a training exercise for what to do during rebellion.
It is not xenophobic to be anti Chinese government. You should know that Xi's government has a recent history of increasing repression and paranoia. It is not that the people are "at risk" of rebelling, it is that the government is paranoid about it.
> therefore China must maintain permanent quarantine/isolation
And how is that bad for Chinese gov? That's exactly what the gov wants - total control over peoples lives, over crossborder flow, but the main reason are health codes allowing total control over population. XJP literally wants his China be NoKo 2.0, COVID was just extremely good excuse, if COVID leaked from Chinese lab I would not be suprised if this was the their goal - introducing COVID zero strategy to have control over whole population under pretense of fighting the virus.
Meanwhile my family can't really come to visit abroad (and they are the lucky ones having passports, good lucking getting new passports and being allowed to travel abroad for pleasure), we could in theory visit China but it's too troublesome and risky under these conditions.
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[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 135 ms ] threadCovid will always be around, but with effective vaccines it’ll be more an annoyance than a serious disease.
Right now China is treating each case like they did before vaccines.
Clearly once restrictions will relax, Covid will spike. At least if they hope to have any normal sort of relationship with the outside world.
So what then? Ignore it? Just one day say “infections don’t matter”?
It’s odd.
Protecting the government image is paramount in totalitarianism.
Or any Disney character?
Similar story with Spider-man: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miles_Morales. There hadn't been an African-american spider-man until 2011.
I'm not a comic book nerd, so I'm probably entirely wrong about this.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Captain_Marvel_(Marvel_Comic...
Miles morales is a different person. He is not Black Peter Parker. They coexist in context dead or alive or across universes or whatever.
If you watch a marvel movie you’ll see it’s mostly character drama, not superhero theatrics. The superhero alias is not the character.
The MCU captain America is currently the Falcon, a black guy, who is objectively much weaker (not a super soldier or powered in any way. He does have fancy flying tech but they’ve tried to convey that he’s clearly inferior). One of the more nuanced and better MCU entries directly addressing the inherent supremacist nature of superhero culture and the cultural implications of just switching the race of a cultural icon. Imo, those are actually important relevant themes to drudge through. They’re not forced woke ideas forced upon people. It’s very problematic if you can’t explore such ideas without criticism for trying to do so rather than critical responses to the ideas themselves.
So there's an outbreak, but yeah let's let everyone squish onto the rides together.
The Store is Closed.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33405541
On the other side, in some parts of Europe there's a discussion to let the infected go to work (even with symptoms and of course, if one's feeling capable of work) - but, still, go to work with other infected/work with infected.
I can understand that with so high density in people even one infection can lead to big massive spreads and thus to overloaded capacity of local hospitals in less than 48h - but, it's too much. I don't have a suggestion how to handle that either. The Best would be everyone just stick a few weeks to the measures and diminish the countless spots to a few controllable one's. If that would be possible, we would not only reduce the cases, but also slowly minimize the spreading. May be 1-2 months, everything wouldn't be a problem any more..
Nike: just do it :)
Isn’t that what China has been attempting for months, rather unsuccessfully?
Regimes lock up particular people when particular people are a threat. They may lock people up unnecessarily just to err on the side of caution. But if they overdo it it can backfire. So far the main reason I hear from Chinese people to criticize Xi and the CCP is mostly about COVID and lockdowns, and never for any of the reasons westerners point the finger against the regime
If you had to choose between a 1% risk of being crippled by COVID, or a 100% risk of living under the strictest lockdown measures your country had for the rest of your life, what would you choose? And the actual risk of long-term consequences is lower.
I live in Europe, the "infected" have gone to work since this February just fine. I mean, those that didn't call in sick days out of their own volition.
Mr. Bones wild ride is real! https://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/rhs54/one_does_not_...
It's a little frustrating, because a bit of painless extra caution now could help avoid something stronger down the line :-/
And of course, all those deaths are horrible, and I feel that pain when I contemplate that for a second. But in my day to day life, I don't see why I'd need to change my behavior.
I am a bit worried about the effects of long Covid for people, but IMO I feel like I need to choose the lesser between two evils which is:
1. Do I lock myself down for 2 years, and fight preventing long Covid and 2% deaths population wide?
2. Do I lock myself down for 5 years, and fight preventing reduced long Covid and 0.15% deaths population wide?
The choices are written down simplified. If you think that there's hindsight bias, there's some but a lot less than you think. I was 2 to 3 weeks ahead of the Dutch government at any point in time. I've been able to protect all the people I care about. For example, my grandparents/parents never caught Covid when there was no vaccine (I was tracking Covid since mid Feb 2022 as a potential threat and constantly ran the probabilities). I'm not even sure if my grandparents ever caught it.
[1] coronadashboard.rijksoverheid.nl
Just look at the RIVM site. It's probably higher than you specified, closer to 6-7k average per year, with massive differences.
> on average 5 people are dying per day (1825 per year)
This is a bit of a dishonest comparison. You're looking at the numbers from before the expected peak, since it's still incredibly warm in the Netherlands right now and peaks seem to happen when it gets colder. So it'll probably be closer to 4000 per year.
While that still seems less than the flu, it's important to realize that the most vulnerable people are now getting vaccinated multiple times a year for covid. A lot of people who never got a flu shot are also being vaccinated. Then there's the fact that a lot of people are still distancing more than they used to. There's more work from home, many people still stay home when they have covid, while in the past, many people prided themselves for going to work with the flu.
It's really hard to compare historic flu statistics with current covid statistics, because the way we handle covid is still very different from how we used to handle the flu. Therefore your conclusion is misguided.
Now I really don't care whether you care about covid, but at lease the interpretation of the statistics should be correct and you missed a ton of details.
[1] https://www.rivm.nl/monitoring-sterftecijfers-nederland
It was never as high as 2% in the first place. The numbers were inflated because we didn't have enough tests to go around, so only the people who we were already pretty sure were infected were tested.
Personal observation ( which contracts established 'science' ). There were always some 'long' aspects of all diseases including for colds/coughs/flu/tuberculosis etc. Nothing special with 'covid'.
Discussions? It's already a thing at least here in Lithuania. Unless you're seriously ill with side effects, you're good to go.
A friend of mine worked in China for many years, but after several months of being locked in their apartment block and tested every 72 hours they chose to leave China.
I honestly couldn't imagine people in the West putting up with that, however I'm yet to fully understand why Chinese people continue to suffer the rules without riot.
https://www.thestatesman.com/world/tibetans-march-on-streets... (note that the protestors are by and large Chinese, not Tibetan)
Of the remaining privileged minority, many are choosing to GTFO.
Edit: the ellipses are because there are other possible outcomes, just that.
I am not blaming the Chinese people. I am blaming the present (well, last 70 years at least) mode of government.
Read Soljenitsin or Ginzburg or Nadiezda Mandelstam and you wil see what totalitarian Communism is capable of.
More edit: I would be totally scared as well, by the way.
because they dont want to take the vaccine, its their choice. The govt should not force you to take the vaccine.
PRC vaccines work about as well as western ones in preventing serious cases, which is to say western vaccines suck as much as PRC vaccines post delta when they couldn't do the one thing that distinguished themselves - preventing spread (which from recent Pfizer drama they didn't even test for so mRNA was... never substantially superior). Hence the entire narrative around superior mRNA wank is ridiculous considering how little benefits it has especially with extra cold chain requirements or just the geopolitics of trusting unreliable foreign govs.
Combine with west being systemically incapable of containing covid and PRC still left with only obvious choice of exercising superior state capcity to zero covid which prevents millions of deaths using stats of mRNA effectiveness in neighbouring east Asian countries. They're still locking down because state capacity > science, including the wests. Plenty of people are still dying from covid every week while 1/5 has long covid. Capitulating to living with covid due to lack of choice =/= covid's over.
https://www.hrw.org/news/2019/09/15/china-xinjiang-children-...
And red COVID QR Codes can destroy you: https://twitter.com/songpinganq/status/1562803858916933638
All I am seeing on HN are people being careful to not offend, but at some point it stops being "cultural differences".
That's exactly my problem, too. Thankfully, someone in the replies to the tweet you sent finishes his sentence without ellipses. "Which is more sad: that they are locked up, or that they allow themselves to be locked up?" But this time he hides behind the rhetorical question mark! Just say the two things already: "Chinese people are docile and weak" and "Chinese people are evil, greedy liars." Let's just skip right to the Myth of the Jew. I just want people to take their beliefs seriously instead of hiding behind vague gestures and "fill in the blanks."
No one is saying Chinese people are evil. My advice to you would be to stop making strawmans like this, that's not what people mean when they expose these atrocities. The CCP is the problem here and the authorities that are expunging basic civil rights in the name of COVID needs to be condemned. COVID is an excuse to control the population under the banner of 'zero-COVID policy'. You can't imprison a person forcibly in a 8x8 ft tent on top of a mountain for COVID isolation and explain away as "cultural differences". No one wants this shit, not the Chinese people.
This unfolding progression is why we cannot take people at face value about what they "really mean." People don't know what they mean! See below: "I honestly couldn't imagine people in the West putting up with that, however I'm yet to fully understand why Chinese people continue to suffer the rules without riot." See? They don't understand it. Why not? What is being repressed, that their conscious could form these highly abstract and grammatically correct sentences, but yet they don't know from whence they came?
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Was the French Ancient Regime a liberal government letting people choose their lawyers?
Was the French Revolution bloodless?
I can also see those people struggling to understand the American style of fierce individualism that creates so much pain and interpersonal conflict for seemingly little gain.
I can also see those people struggling to understand the American style of fierce individualism that creates so much pain and interpersonal conflict for seemingly little gain.
Fierce individualism in some aspect, maybe. But don't forget that the state is extremely powerful in enforcing and reinforcing certain patterns of living.
They do not riot, because they, too, understand, that the capacity of hospitals is quite low comparable to the density of people.
The other points: You can't just leave the country without being a foreigner. Chinese people need a Visa for the countries they want to enter.
The social score / if you participate in riots, you for sure will get identified.
The fear being hurt.
No other possibility, because the Chinese officials are really hard in that terms and they don't care if one get hurt.
No other possibility, because the doors are locked by the officials. No one can go to riot.
They use an app to track one's location and track whether one's in "red area". If so, you lose. Everyone have this app. Without app you can't even buy things on the market.
And of course, the CCP. They have a high membership rate. You can't do some jobs like teacher/professor without being a CCP member. So, they're full on the line of party, because they really believe in that. My exgirlfriend entered the party on her 18th, because her father was a doctor at a military hospital. Being a non member gives you some disadvantages in some parts of live (indirectly, but there are some).
So, you have to speak the language (me do) and have to have lived there for a while (me did) to understand why they're doing it and why they're is not much withstanding of the people.
One of my girlfriends (haha) just arrived two weeks ago in europe. She says it's crazy over there. No end of the 0-covid in sight... Her flight was cancelled 8h before flight because of lockdown of the airport. She had to rebuy the tickets, go to Shanghai and start off there.. But she does not criticize or get angry when talking about this. Her family is still there. She is just happy to be in Europe, because of me and main purpose studying - not because of the measures.
But, yes. It's crazy.
Maybe it's just something about being an American, but even while I was in the Army I had a "fuck you" attitude about most everything that the brass (i.e. the leadership, if "brass" doesn't translate) made us do. Now that I'm a "civilian" again I still retain this attitude. A lot of important business leaders do too. I'm not really sure if this is a feature of American culture or not, but it's certainly a truism that has existed for a loooooong time.
If you're blasted with propaganda constantly, if the means and mode of productions are set up in a certain way which encourages certain behaviour, it becomes very difficult for people to even realise there are other possibilities.
This is a feature of every society, including in the West. We have a strong individualist "fuck you, I've got mine" tendency, but just like China and Russia, there is a large portion of the population that also lauds the people who exploit us because they are seen as something to aspire to.
Don't get me wrong, I'd rather live in the West, but personally I see many similarities when you look at the life of an average person.
I agree with this point:
> We have a strong individualist "fuck you, I've got mine" tendency, but just like China and Russia, there is a large portion of the population that also lauds the people who exploit us because they are seen as something to aspire to.
There's a problem when "fuck you" is taken to scale and is the operative means for running a government. It's a hard problem to solve, since I want a responsible and competent republic to maintain a reserve of "fuck you" people because, and let's be honest here, they're the ones who fight wars.
The consequences are where the biggest difference lie. Look what happened to Jintao a week ago. You are truly never safe issuing criticism in China.
You can have some immigrant like Elon Musk tweet insults to the president and people complain but nothing happens. You can have companies create new businesses directly in violation of laws (Uber, AirBnB). There are very few sacred cows and we tend to root for the underdog.
From living in Asia, deference plays a big role in social relations - deference to parents, deference to elders and definitely deference to authority/government. And it’s often not for a rational reason but just because “you should respect your elders”.
I hear lots of people say it’s “well they are more group oriented and think about what’s best for everyone” but one look at the piles of trash randomly dropped or people shoving to the front of lines makes me think it’s not that.
It’s more of acceptance that what the government says is how it will be. They’ll bitch about it, happily break rules if they can get away with it, but if the government comes in and says “dont do that or you’ll be punished” they won’t push back and will defer to the governments authority.
Main reason is family first. The ccp will threaten your loved ones, if you do not comply. And family is all you got to rely on, as social network, as thrustworthy people, as pension plan, as everything in a culture optimized to pitch man vs man.
Its a mob, threatening the citizens. All the cultural factors amplify the mobs power, and no nobody believes the texts of the ccp. Its just that the don is always right.
You can't study at a university without your membership card. Just in case why you wondered why everybody you meet is a CCP member.
But all the other schools run by privates, it's not an big issue.
:)
Xi said that they will end lockdowns in 2024, the same year they will come out with their MRNA vaccines. I dont know why they arent buying western vaccines though. Trade restrictions? Xi's pride?
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fosun_International
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pfizer%E2%80%93BioNTech_COVID%...
The biggest COVID problem in Hong Kong (and also to a large extend in China) I gather is that the vaccination rate among the elderly was the lowest, which is a reversal from most other countries. That creates huge problems for hospitals, as the elderly are massively over-represented in COVID hospitalisations. It's not completely known why the elderly vaccination rate is relatively low, but I suspect misinformation and conspiracy stories (which proliferate just as much on the Chinese social media platforms as here on Facebook) is a significant contributor.
2 reasons.
1) Because while they bought MRNA vaccines for themselves (top CCP officials) they want their own local made vaccines to appear good. In China when you have vaccines for kids and such, people who have money pay to use western versions of the vaccines, while those who can't afford use the free local ones. This is mainly due to the issues with fake vaccines in the past.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/23/world/asia/china-vaccines...
2) Xi and the CCP are trying to save face, they cannot admit to the number of cases, deaths, or that zero covid is hurting the economy and failing spectacularly. They have spent 3 years trying to convince the world they were right and that they are the success story while everyone else is a failure.
Internally they have the benefit of controlling 100% of the media so they can control the narrative. But videos and such leak out of China and those can't be scrubbed, they rely on the spreading of their own propaganda on Twitter and Youtube to discredit anyone who talks negatively about China. Any video that shows a door being welded shut with people inside, or a person being put in a box, or dogs being killed in the streets, this is all "western propaganda". It sucks that the CCP giving China a bad name when majority of people there just want to live their lives and are good people.
Xi's project was Xiongan New Area and its an epic failure. Essentially his baby, is slowly being swept under the rug and pretending it doesn't exist. Since 100% of the media in China is state owned and controlled, when things fail like this they just pretend its either going well or it never happened.
Had a co-worker who also moved back to Singapore after spending many years living in Shanghai. They gave her 4 eggs and a bag of lettuce to last for 1 week, thankfully the apartment block she lived in had a person sneak in every few days with groceries for the building because the local authories didn't care. Being woken up at 5am daily for mandatory testing.
A demonstration risks not only destabilision of this myth, it risks bloodshed and massacres because stability was won after so much pain.
To be Chinese in a certain way is to work against chaos. As much as to be British is to maintain the dignity of individual persons.
It's kind of hard to find a western equivalent which uses the hard lessons of history. Maybe something like the rule of law?
The government here even outwardly admitted that there was no scientific proof or support for curfews, and yet nothing happened, and they just got re-elected a month ago with a crushing majority.
Lockdown may be a temporary solution. The long-term solution is to maintain better hygiene (masks, washing hands) and get the vaccine without turning into political drama all over Twitter.
I always thought the pandemic will make fist bumps or other forms of greetings “mainstream”. But everyone (I know) have reverted back to hand shakes. I guessing the same with Covid hygiene measures.
> get the vaccine without turning into political drama all over Twitter.
Like the majority of the people not taking the vaccine are on Twitter or do so because of social media drama.
But here we are.
[Edited to explicitly indicate that this was a satirical post]
So glad that we are back to the way it was.
Projection of your overall health & cleanliness?
Of course, we cannot expect us Westerners to have that level of compassion and common sense.
The people I know who still wear masks and myself wear them so that others don't get our cold, not necessarily to protect ourselves. A form of respect towards co-workers etc.
While it’s not a majority of people, I still routinely see people wearing masks out and about, particularly on public transport. But I suspect it’s primarily as a defence against other peoples germs. Which I’ll admit is why I’m currently looking at nicer less “hospital” masks, notably a few companies that make respirators had a mini boom and diversified into “everyday wear” models that didn’t look like you were fumigating for termites. There are reusable respirators that just look like nicer disposable ones now.
It’s also helps that people don’t find it as weird if you have a mask on when riding a bike since that’s been sort of a normal look for a while, pioneered by both the Lycra wearing enthusiasts and the boom in bike couriers thanks to food delivery apps and no one riding as a courier wants to breath car and truck fumes all day.
I thought masks were the clearest indicator of a person’s perspective on themselves and their role in society: the same ones who complain about their rights being oppressed are the ones who get the most upset with people like me who take them at their word and then suddenly discover hypocrisy at the core.
I’m so glad we had this moment for people to show their true selves in such a simple fashion. Not as easy as the “Insane” hand stamp that Homer Simpson got (“why won’t this wash off?!?!”) but it’s nature at work again. See bright color snake or reptile? Likely poisonous as a defense mechanism. See a human with dyed hair and a bunch of metal shit in their face? Different kind of poisonous but still there. No mask during peak time = asshole.
The same kind of asshole that doesn’t put their shopping cart / trolley back in the corral. Yes, those people are assholes. If you’re that lazy, reader, stop acting like an asshole.
Hope you have a living will or your own respirator on standby, cuz your attitude is going to mandate in the long run you’re in the “didn’t give a shit then, so we don’t give a shit now” pile. It’s called a hospital.
A very, very close friend was saved by NYC EMTs and Doctors and from that experience career changed into a full RN now on a cardiac ward in Ohio. He’s super high risk and excerpt from COVID work thankfully. It was a hard job at first, watching 50% of patients die because what brought them in was too late to fix. Game over.
When COVID hit he told me stories of how many middle America reasonable people were in denial as it was killing them in beds. They fought until the end. The worst ones realized they fucked up and would pay for it and with no friends or family on the way out. Fuckin brutal, death in cold sterile isolation with yourself to blame. Intellectual suicide.
It will never be the way it was ever again, because our society is broken because people like you care more about the wrong shit than you can admit, and politely, don’t wear a mask, fully inhale on that helium tank to entertain your friends with a funny voice at your next party.
Asking for glove use would have a huge environmental impact…
Nobody would be able to tell in our era.
I'm aware that fomites are not the main cause (or even a cause at all) that the disease spreads. Nevertheless, proper hand hygiene seems to be a good idea to me.
I think Fauci said that he hoped that COVID would stop "the barbaric practice of shaking hands."
Yeeeahhh... I don't think that's happening.
In some Asian countries, people bow, or clasp their own hands in greeting and/or respect.
I thought that the pandemic would make sneezing and coughing into your hands passé, but I still see plenty of people doing exactly that.
Of course the risk-averse would not be satisfied with "pretty low risk" and can still refuse handshakes. I remember reading that for someone to give you Covid through a handshake, they'd have to cough into their hand, shake your hand, and you'd have to put your hand close to your mouth/nose soon after that.
The Chinese government were reporting virus samples found on surfaces after 3 days, but these were tiny samples, tiny viral loads won't harm us.
Indoor masking is also not 100%, you can't smell Covid but you can smell cigarette smoke, I think an appropriate analogy is, if someone's been exhaling their cigarette-smoke-laden breath into a room for 30 minutes, and you walked into that room, would you smell the cigarette? Even with a Covid mask?
Outside of China, how many countries continued a lockdown solution after vaccines became widely available (in that country)? Some countries at least pursued split lockdowns where vaccinated people were completely free.
Not trying to shoehorn this discussion into politics, but the movement pushing back against lockdowns and forced/semi-forced vaccination isn't composed entirely out of anti-vaxxers or conspiracy nuts.
I'm quite sure it's always going to be controversial to enforce a lockdown, no matter what country you're in. In some countries the controversy will be whispered because it cannot be shouted, but it doesn't make it less controversial.
Still, if the only goal of the lockdowns was to keep the health system from collapsing, and the vaccines effectively reduced the health problems associated with infection, then a relatively relaxed attitude about infection amongst vaccinated individuals is completely consistent with my implicit claim, here made explicit: that the lessons my original PP alleged we learnt so we could do better next time are exactly what we came up with in the height of the pandemic. Yet it was extremely divisive and destructive of social unity. I honestly doubt most democratic/responsible countries could do the same thing if another pandemic came out in five years time - even the same leaders would make different decisions. If the lesson is "what we did was the best we could do", then that just isn't good enough.
Now imagine how frustrated I've been for nearly two years on this: I knew this in Dec 2020. Pfizer never lied here, and we knew for a month or two after the vaccines were announced that this was the case. The lie came from media and politicians months after the vaccine was announced.
For example, before it was memory-holed:
https://www.washington.edu/news/2020/12/02/covid-19-vaccines...
https://www.businessinsider.com/who-says-no-evidence-coronav...
https://www.fredhutch.org/en/news/center-news/2020/12/covid-...
i've heard that sinovac vaccine for covid wasnt as effective as mrna ones, and that may be a reason they are still doing lockdowns.. they may not have much of a choice
good to hear some info from people there... then i wonder why they are still doing zero-covid lockdowns?
is it hesitation for getting the vaccine? something else?
That's why I wonder what China is trying to achieve here. Are they trying to get rid of any foreign dependence under the pretext of health concerns? Turkey's Erdogan did something like that with their stock exchange, i.e. pushing out foreign capital let Erdogan do economically ridiculous things without having international pushback.
Most likely explanation: Population/unrest control. If you can randomly shut down parts of the country for the pretend reason of a plague, you can stop unrest from rising. Do shut down small areas randomly for maximum fear and effect.
Remember the Hong Kong protests?
Perhaps the authority was concerned the unproductive unrest would go down like Libya, Syria, Egypt, Ukraine without and endstate better than how things were before the young and impressionable took to the street.
Based on one metric. But ultimately it's self defeating. If you flush the economy down the toilet then there isn't the money for clean water, or hospitals etc.
Further zero flu works better than the vaccine. Do you want to stop the world until every disease is eradicated.
Lockdowns were never sustainable, in the context of a modern economy. It's a question of the least worst option. Vaccines mean it's no longer the least worst option.
Millions of dead, and 100s of millions taken out of workforce for ~2 weeks during infection, possibly multiple times, possibly with long covid effects for years after, or we're coming up on winter where immunity weakest. It's far from clear vaccines isn't the worst option short term (0-3 years).
>flush the economy down the toilet
I mean sure? Except with confluence of global factors PRC economy, while underperforming is still outperforming most of western countries, as stated above. Hence status quo is currently sustainable, there is less pressure to deliver economically when everyone else is sinking. Obviously sustainable not long term, but I can easily see another year or two, especially with global slow down. The broader point being, all the western MSM reporting on PRC wrecking itself economically is avoiding the fact that it's not wrecking itself as much as most developing countries with RU sanctions, or dealing with US dollar, and US dealing with end of cheap money. Zero covid + three red lines on real estate + tech crack down, etc all deliberate policy choices are not as devasting as 10% inflation or end of cheap credit causing housing sales + tech valuations to crash like in PRC. It's not world ending, PRC is collapsing stuff.
>Do you want to stop the world until every disease is eradicated
No I think PRC wants to stop this specific disease that has demonstrably kills many people with linger side effects even in wealthy countries with access to better health care.
E: posting rate limited so @benj111
>So I don't even know what figures you are working with
Studies conservatively extrapolating TW/SKR post living with covid + mRNA numbers to PRC with modifier for lower per capital med care access. I don't know what figures you are working with to conclude ~3M would get covid when it will be 100s of millions since no vaccine prevent spread and majority of pop have no natural immunity. Estimates from scientists who actually crunched the numbers: a few million dead, significant % of which due to overhelming hospital infra.
1. Millions of dead (conservative estimate is ~2+) is still factually a lot of dead to deal with. If that can be avoided with accepted costs (which I'm arguing, currently is) then why not.
2. It's worse in that it comes with millions of dead bodies and at least 10s of millions long covid. Maybe zero covid is sunk cost and those figures are inevitable, but still no compelling reason for lifting short term.
3. Covid = flu? Are linger side effects of flu as well understood as covid? Annual influenza deaths is fraction of covid deaths. Extrapolating from US annual flu deaths, in PRC, influenza would kill ~100,000 per year vs again millions of covid deaths in same period. Like if PRC can get away with only 500k hospitalizations, Xi could personally go smother each covid ICU patient and still spin it as a win.
1. In a country of billions, 'millions' could mean fractions of a percent. 'millions' in this context is just emotive rather than factual.
2. What do you mean taken out of the workforce? From illness? That sound wrong. From isolating? How is that worse than it Chinese status quo?
>No I think PRC wants to stop this specific disease that has demonstrably kills many people with linger side effects even in wealthy countries with access to better health care.
Which is why I specifically gave the example of flu. A disease that kills and has lingering side effects. A disease that we live with currently. Millions of people in China probably due from flu every year. Which incidentally shows how flawed your use of the figure is.
From what I can work out ~3m people would be expected to get covid in China if they were all vaccinated. ~500k would be hospitalised. And ~70k would develop long covid lasting at least 6 months. So I don't even know what figures you are working with.
https://health-study.joinzoe.com/post/risk-covid-after-vacci...
>We saw that 2,394 and 187 people tested positive for COVID-19 more than two >weeks after their first and second jabs, respectively, with the chances of ?>becoming infected falling as time passed.
>That’s the equivalent of one in 500 (0.2%) and one in 3,333 (0.03%)
1,400,000,000 x 0.002 = 2,800,000
(Note I actually misinterpretted this as applying to 2 different vaccines, of which I chose the least effective, whereas this is after just 1 jab.)
based on double jab figures the figure would be around 0.5 million.
>Reassuringly, only 104 people in the vaccinated group who tested positive for COVID-19 ended up in hospital (one in 2,500 or 0.04%).
1,400,000,000 x 0.0004 = 560,000
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/long-term-effects/... >Estimates of the proportion of people who had COVID-19 that go on to >experience post-COVID conditions can vary:
>13.3% at one month or longer after infection >2.5% at three months or longer, based on self-reporting >More than 30% at 6 months among patients who were hospitalized
2,800,000 x 0.025 = 70,000 (although this is based on the single jabbed figure, fully jabbed the figure would be 1400.
>when it will be 100s of millions since no vaccine prevent spread
Are you saying the vaccine doesn't stop you getting covid? that is false. It doesn't stop it 100% but it is significant, significant enough that outbreaks can die off on their own. Further i'm not sure if thats even relevant, the issue is how many it kills. its easy to get a cold, you don't need to worry about getting a cold because that won't kill you. so the relevant factor is how good is the vaccine at preventing major illness and hospitalisation.
https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...
vaccines lower risk of infection by 60% - 80% vaccines lower the risk of symptomatic disease by 65% - 90% vaccines lower risk of hospitalisation by 90% vaccines lower risk of death by over 90%
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-022-01855-7
> lift such measures could see more than 112 million symptomatic cases of Covid-19, five million hospitalisations, and 1.55 million deaths.
There's also later analysis that extrapolates with TW/SKR numbers after they began living with covid with IIRC greater deaths. These are fellow East Asian examples with more simliar conditions than PRC except they have much better per capita health care infra.
>relevant factor is how good is the vaccine at preventing major illness and hospitalisation.
Yes and the relevant factor to that relevant factor is PRC doesn't have the ICU beds / hospital infra per capita to absorb even vaxed spread. Most of country is old and underdeveloped and "crushing the curve" is still the best path. Vax prevents severe cases but at PRC scale and infectiousness of omicron, in dense urban enviroments during colder seasons, that's still more symptomatic severe cases than the medical system can handle.
>We find that the level of immunity induced by the March 2022 vaccination campaign would be insufficient to prevent an Omicron wave that would result in exceeding critical care capacity with a projected intensive care unit peak demand of 15.6 times the existing capacity
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/may/11/lifting-zero-c...
That's the crux of the issue, PRC is a developing country with low hospital beds per capita that demographically skews old (and antivax). These factors means PRC is better off with no vaccines and zero covid than vaccines and living with covid until zero covid or some other factor makes zero covid unsustainble.
If China was able to logistically handle zero covid, I would be more inclined to agree with you. However, each time a city in China has been locked down, it has been a logistical disaster that almost always resulted in:
- extremely poor quarantine zones in unsanitary conditions (which defeats the purpose of being free of disease). This includes many people who were lucky enough to quarantine in their own homes as even their pets are not allowed to leave, they need to dedicate spaces in their home for their animals to defecate.
- lack of basic necessities; food, heating, water leakage, insect problems, or even lacking a proper indoor building in some cases.
- a lack of professionalism, discipline, or even respect of human decency among the staff. Attaching spikes to entrances to keep people from leaving by force, refusing to allow elderly access to medical care, threatening people with weapons, security bao'ans going on China social media laughing about all the new found power and control they have over the populace, beating people in a show of their power trips.
- questionable policies, such as requiring everyone in a community to come together, line up, for a covid test, which increases the likelihood of getting covid, rather than go door to door.
This has lead to more than just inconveniences, it's lead to death. Which is supposedly the very thing this is all supposed to avoid. The Chinese state has proven by experience, repeatedly, that it cannot logistically handle these strict policies. It is a failure of the zero covid policy and a failure of the Chinese Communist Party to administer its State in a competent manner.
Seeing as we are almost 12+ months post delta/omicron and local outbreaks have consistently been contained to prevent uncontrolled geometric spread, yes PRC is logistically handling zero covid. Over many lock downs, of various sizes, across different regions, to keep spread at so-far managable levels.
> logistical disaster / always resulted in / it's lead to death
Of course, it's not a smooth 5star process, shutting down urban regions with millions fundmentally can't be. That's not a failure of policy, but acceptable baseline for competent epidemiologic management, competence being it contains spread and saves significantly more lives than it takes. Some pain/death is inevitable operating on the scale of hundreds of millions. The "very thing it's suppose to avoid" is millions of deaths due to uncontrolled spread and overwhelmed medical system, not a hundreds/thousands of incidental deaths because someone peoeple starved/suicided/bus crashed. Same with increasing chance of local spread to prevent higher order spread. Like these aren't exquistily managed bespoke interventions, they're coarse but by now tested methods that can be implemented in a snap. Of course it's not clean, but it's better than health system collapsing. The cost benefit analysis of maintaining zero covid, when one can, and PRC can, is obvious. So obvious that I'd argue they're politically trapped by repeated demonstrating ability to logistically execute zero covid.
You understand that with globalization, this makes no sense, right? It will return, again and again. Economic impact of always going into lockdown will be insane. Another reason for western companies to become less dependent on China in the long term, massive reduction in productivity in the short term.
Also high IFR viruses usually have high symptoms. Much easier to contain a disease when you can tell people are sick. People feeling sick will also travel and spread less. What made covid so widespread is that it was so mild to so many people. So there is a kind of bell curve of deadliness vs infectiousness. So not really convinced by those argument of what if covid was so much deadlier. You would need a virus with zero symptom while you are infectious, and then that kills you, like an airborne HIV. Anything is possible but with ifs...
Second, the measures allowed most people to move relatively freely and go to discos when we still had blanket lockdowns in the west. The idea was to crackdown hard and quickly create green zones were life was possible almost as before. While that means millions of people on lockdown at a given time, it was likely a small fraction of the total population. (I'd like to see actual numbers here but find them hard to come by TBH).
Third, COVID is special as it is one of the few airborne / aerosol-transmitted diseases that you have a good chanche of supressing. The reason is that it shows overdispersion: most people are only slightly contagious, but few people are extremely contagious. (Caveat: I think that was the case with SARS, and with the early SARS-COV-2 variants, but I haven't seen data for Omicron.) This means that contact tracing is extremely effective. Most people will have had contact with the same few spreaders, and if you take them out, you can suppress the virus such that it will die out in a population. Western countries borked that up completely. When the incident numbers were really low, we dropped most measures, but that would have been the opportunity to eradicate it with just 1-2 more weeks of social distancing. Asian countries were much more successful with suppression.
Finally, China is a huge country. Most people move around inside, but rarely leave (its a bit like the US in that regard but much more so). To leave as a Chinese citizen you actually need an exit visa. So the majority of people are not bothered very much by travel restrictions. The comparatively little cross border traffic you can control by just giving everybody mandatory PCR tests. I could imagine the Borders to north Korea, as well as to Laos/Vietnam might be problematic to control, but AFAIK they are pretty closed up now.
So it makes totally sense to them to continue their strict course. I imagine as soon as a good vaccine becomes available there too (maybe a nasal vaccine that can prevent infection and not just severe cases), they will reevaluate.
The fatal flaw of this reasoning is that it lies dormant in animals.
I don't think bats are to blame, nor can this be a "simple matter" of zoonotic spillover.
With the mRNA vaccines and the weaker virus variants, we averted a lot of deaths and the "collapse" of the hospitals in many places. But we are still dealing with many dead, millions of work days lost per year, and many cases of long covid...
How is this determined? A democratic vote....in China? At best, it's tyranny of the majority. The article quoted Xi as saying the people wanted it, but that's not the same thing.
"Videos posted on Chinese social media site Weibo showed people rushing to the park's gates following the announcement but finding them already locked."
It's a great policy to apply to other people. But it seems that they don't want any of it.
From reading scientific papers about the occurrence of complications in people who've had Covid twice, it looks like the virus inflicts long-lasting damage to the body, even if it isn't readily apparent.
People how have Covid twice have a higher rate of complication the second time around (including post-Covid syndrome a.k.a. long covid). There are no reasons to think that people in places where "living with Covid" is a thing really are rotting with it. Vaccines do little to protect against this.
In Europe, the cumulative incidence of confirmed infections is nearing 50% of the population (and ~30% in the US). In China, that number is less than 1%.
Major caveat regarding the reasoning above, the studies were carried before omicron emerged. These variants have fewer complications, not sure how this will compound.
It is possible that the drop in productivity in the US that's been reported this week (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33405389) is in part driven by lower mental acuity or immune system performance. The decline may not be large enough to be noticeable on a day to day basis, yet show up in aggregate measurements.
Xi may be playing the long game here. If the above holds, even if Covid ends up endemic in China after a while, its workers would have an edge on the rest of the world.
————
https://www.researchsquare.com/article/rs-1749502/v1 (it's only a preprint, but third party experts vouch for it: https://edition.cnn.com/2022/07/05/health/covid-reinfection-...)
I've read an earlier paper on the topic, but I can't find it right now.
If you can believe that number. If I had Covid in China I would do everything to keep that a secret.
The drop in productivity is a fake as it is still higher than in 2010 before Covid.
China already has an edge by numbers alone. Total productivity is the main factor here.
> The drop in productivity is a fake as it is still higher than in 2010 before Covid.
Could it be that we made technological progress in the mean time?
The drop definitely isn't fake (https://www.bls.gov/charts/productivity-and-costs/nonfarm-bu..., look at the blue line), and a stark break from a consistent increase in productivity that's been ongoing for decades with few exceptions (https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/labor-productivity-per-ho...).
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2022/10/31/productiv...
This is a typical media filler story. Textual bullshit. Reality was probably too boring again.
The WaPo article only shows the dotted line data from the BLS graph, which is far noisier, but shows two consecutive quarters of decline, which is unusual too.
I had no idea this was openly discussed over there (though I suppose I should have guessed it was).
Exactly the same as what the western world has tried for 2 years, give or take. It doesn’t work either way, but due to their authoritarian government they just have the ability to keep trying for longer.
Frankly I'm surprised that China managed to control Omicron. It's certainly a social-technical feat.
In the end, only time will tell whether the Chinese strategy was a good one for China. Obviously China has paid extreme costs to maintain its policy. It's still unknown what the longer term results to the health of the population will be in other countries will be though.
The fantasy with COVID was that you'd get R<1 for a period of time until there was a vaccine, and then the vaccine would do all of the work keeping R<1. Unfortunately the COVID vaccine doesn't do that. Hopefully some day we will have one that does that.
Now at the beginning, one strategy could have been: get R much lower than 1, and push the disease to near eradication, and then dynamically change anti-covid measures so that R approximately equaled 1, which would entail substantial restrictions, but not a Wuhan or Shanghai style lockdown.
The problem is that riding along at exactly R=1 means any time the seasons change, or there's a new variant, or people's behavior changes, you have to constantly adjust restrictions. Generally it has been shown to be impossible in democracies to get enough people to agree to do this, and it's generally not politically possible to enforce this.
Once the vaccines came out, the hope was always that they would dramatically reduce transmission so that R was much less than 1 and we could treat it like measles, and for a while (mid-2021, pre-Delta) that seemed to be the case, but between waning immunity and Omicron, it turned out that the vaccines were not able to reduce transmission to a great enough degree to make this happen.
Either way the R values theory was never going to work because there was always going to be a big part of the population (animals, people abroad) that can’t be controlled with lockdowns or vaccine mandates. And that also should have been known.
And lastly, R values theories make for nice, easy to explain pop science, but it’s all statistics with all the downsides: the R value that’s on the news is just a number calculated from limited tests, and those tests can be manipulated. And it’s part of a random process; R>1 doesn’t ‘mean flare ups will occur’. It means the chance is higher that the numbers will go up. But they can also randomly go down.
All interesting for pop science and for making models and reports but a lot less useful for political decisionmaking in the real world.
The problem is that this data was gathered with a different version of the virus than we have now, and it was gathered with relatively fresh vaccinations. Even pre-Delta, you could see immunity waning leading to increased transmission in Israel. With Omicron, the efficacy of the vaccines is also much less.
That said, from all the evidence we have, the existing vaccines still do reduce transmission, but not enough to prevent epidemic spread. There are a lot of numbers, because every study has a different population and different ways of measuring, but roughly speaking, being vaccinated cuts your risk of contracting and transmitting COVID by something on the order of 50%. That's a lot better than nothing, but COVID is so contagious that it's not enough.
The "R values theory" is perfectly reasonable and almost tautologically correct, and works regardless of an animal reservoir and imported cases from travel. We have the same issue with imported cases with Measles, but hardly anyone gets Measles, because almost everyone is vaccinated, and the R value in the population is much less than 1. If you import a case, that case infects less than 1 person on average, who infects less than 1 person on average, etc, until it dies out. R<<1 doesn't mean you have no cases, it just means that it's self limiting. If you import say, 100 cases a year, maybe that leads to 50 or 100 locally acquired cases total, but for the average person, you don't really have to worry about it. The exception is communities with low vaccination rates. You sometimes see Measles pop up still in the U.S. in religious communities, etc, because R for Measles in those communities is greater than 1 due to the lack of vaccination.
It would be great if COVID and COVID vaccines were like Measles, but unfortunately the vaccine isn't yet good enough.
At this point, it is about the appearance of taking action so that the policy decisions of Xi Jinping's government seem correct, not about doing what's effective for the overall health of the system which includes all of the governed in all the variety of their activities and pursuits.
The divestment of China has more reasons than just COVID:
- Wages in China have risen to a point where other countries have an advantage because unchecked capitalism always optimizes for "inefficiency", and labor costs are an immense factor for these extremely large operations
- Western sanctions against China have increased, to a point where Western customers cannot be sure they are not the next ones caught in the crossfire
- China itself has drifted away from their weird "communism plus capitalism with some personal liberty" hybrid under Xi Jinping, who has pretty much cleansed the party of everyone not lined up with his ideology over the last years, additionally large investors have been penalized by the Party in various degrees (e.g. Jack Ma). Foreign investors do not like the prospect of their investment being seized at will by the Party as well, and not everyone can afford the level of influence ultra-corporations like BASF or VW have on their local governments to protect them to some degree from such actions.
- China's internal economy is collapsing as well, adding further insecurity for foreign investors
- Many are scared of the possibility of China snacking themselves off a piece or the whole of Taiwan. The US have a long-standing commitment to defend Taiwan, so it is crystal clear that any such attempt would lead to a full-blown war with all associated costs. Unfortunately, as we've seen with Putin, individual idiocy of dictators can be enough to override common sense.
> Lockdown may be a temporary solution. The long-term solution is to maintain better hygiene (masks, washing hands) and get the vaccine without turning into political drama all over Twitter.
Agreed. The problem with China's COVID policy, however, is not antivaxxers on Twitter - it is that the Chinese vaccines are absolute trash compared to Western vaccines, but Xi Jinping can't really backtrack on his decision to only use domestic vaccines because that would imply he, the half-god, has made an error in judgement.
The Chinese vaccine was the first vaccine out; and in particular the mRNA vaccine technology was new and unproven. There would be no shame in saying, "We can be proud that Sinovac was the first vaccine approved; it saved millions of lives and allowed us to go back to normal long before anyone else. But now, in the light of the new, more virulent strains of COVID (created in part by decision of the rest of the world not to implement coordinated lockdown strategies), and in the light of the extensive testing of the new mRNA vaccine technology, it makes sense to move on."
At least, there shouldn't be any shame in saying something like that; the shame is only in he heads of the CCP.
This is the political equivalent of a comb-over. People wearing a comb-over look in the mirror and convince themselves that it looks better than just being bald; whereas everyone else can already see that they're bald, and disrespect them more for refusing to accept the fact than they would just pure baldness.
China can't be that absurd can they? That just seems totally crazy to me.
Also China's vaccine isn't that bad, really. And it'd probably be pretty solid with a single MRNA booster.
It absolutely is, particularly against Omicron and its successors [1].
[1] https://www.ft.com/content/729f1dc0-32d1-42c9-bb62-63a41f1e8...
If they want to limit demonstrations and get even more power over the people, lockdowns and not allowing mRNA based vaccines inside the country is a great tool.
Now find me the exact Chinese legal doc that bans Winnie the Pooh.
Edit: A chinese resident confirmed that two links into the Quora page linked to above. Quora insists on Facebook or Google for me, so no linking.
They want to avoid that the Dear Leader (who went all in on a massively restrictive Covid policy and took full credit for it) loses face.
Jinping isn't pulling the strings. Mouse Tse-Tung is behind this.
https://www.gavi.org/vaccineswork/how-important-are-surfaces...
Are you sure Taiwan, South Korea and Hong Kong fit on that list?
The default talking point and narrative is that even if masks were only 0.1% effective that tiny effect exponentially compounds and over time and leads to <insert massive number here> lives saved.
Then you have Pakistan where no measures are taken yet the there is no exponential spiraling out of control
The vaccine that doesn't stop you from getting it.
Universal masking is actually embarrassingly ineffective.
Properly worn PPE ( like done in hospitals, takes 10 minutes to put on and will leave a mark on your face ) and Hazmats work pretty well though.
The shitty disposable surgical mask from slave labourers in india that you have kept in your pocket for 6 months does fuck all.
What a surprise. You might be right, but the onus is on you to provide evidence if you are challenging the status quo.
Then in 2020 hysteria broke out, most scientists got scared shtless and you could only publish papers that indicate that masks work even though all the empirical evidence around us show that they don't.
If anything shows how short term scientific consensus is trivially falsifiable as it depends on few influential people.
Good luck trying to get a NIH grant with the hypothesis that masks might no be effective ... It is a no-go hypothesis from the start.
Same with zoonotic vs lab origin.
Can we please drop this from COVID discussions? COVID isn’t spread by touch. That was apparent early on, but a lot of energy and resources were still diverted from “things that work” to a cleaning fetish.
Their post wasn't only about covid.
COVID's primary means of infection certainly isn't touch, but that doesn't preclude getting the droplets on your hands and introducing them by touching your face.
so the whole touching your face is a red herring
I am sure you and I and everyone else, has lots of things on their faces at all times
At that point, it seems kind of obvious that washing your hands reduces disease. But for cultures that have more "advanced" bathroom ritual, is hand washing beyond cleaning literal shit off your hands actually effective? I can't imagine that a person could dedicate enough time to hand washing versus the amount of times they touch things and their faces, to make it a practice with good enough adherence rates to be considered useful policy.
I believe it's been shown extensively in military studies as a means to reducing respiratory illnesses.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mad_Tea_Party
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yurt
Last report is that everyone left by 10:30pm [0]
Don't get me wrong however, I would not appreciate being stuck in such circumstances for multiple hours.
[0] https://www.scmp.com/video/coronavirus/3197996/thousands-stu... (video timestamp: 0:50)
That certainly sounds hectic, but this feels like clickbait. Being delayed by a few hours is pretty typical anywhere you may go with unforeseen circumstances.
Being locked inside disneyland is one of those situations you envision?
It's a spooky enough scenario to be sexy to think about, but not even I'm tinfoil hat enough to think that's a practical move for us right now.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33424857
Worry probably causes neural degradation too.
I'm still gonna drink alcohol and I'm still going to end up catching some diseases. I'll probably still eat some burgers, too. I'd like to not be a total wreck for doing any of these sorts of things too much.
I've heard ferrets smell kinda bad, but I'd probably still want to pet a brain damaged one.
Since there are some promising developments in treating CE/MFS now, I'll continue trying to not get infected, though it is getting less easy with seemingly nobody left to give a shit.
Genuinely curious, which one would that be?
What China knows is that their vaccines are worse than the western ones, too many old people didn't get vaccinated at all and they don't have the hospital capacity to just ride out the infections waves without many deaths.
There is a part of me that thinks that they either know something that we do not about the current disease, or they know something we don't about something that is to come. Maybe they're concerned about working out the kinks of managing a society during a pandemic, with COVID as a trial run. Their level of control seems insane when what we're dealing with is COVID (as far as we know), but what if we're dealing with something worse? Suddenly the civil liberties and laissez faire take of the west is an unimaginable disadvantage.
Citation needed. It is one of the possibilities, and the WHO says that there there's no clear winner yet[1]. Admittedly, this is a reversal of previous assessments, where the lab leak theory was all but dismissed entirely.[2]
[1]: https://www.science.org/content/article/open-minded-underwhe... [2]: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-00877-4
https://www.help.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/report_an_analysis...
China had extraordinary success with their 0-covid strategy following the first two months of pandemic and were largely unaffected while western countries were struggling with intermittent lockdowns and massive death tolls. It really showed one of the strengths of China's regime and I think it formed a part of their national pride.
It's hard for them to walk back from that now because of how much it contradicts what they've been saying for over 2 years.
It's patently obviously with Covid quickly becoming or already endemic in the rest of the world that these outbreaks will continue, and likely grow, in China. So are they using this policy just as a tool to show the control they have? At some point of there is enough damage to the economy and damage to individuals that it only increases the likelihood of large scale social unrest.
Malicious compliance of people implementing the programs.
Ruining Chi's legacy.
Normalization for a more authoritarian shift.
Fear of losing a tool that prevents movement (IE lockdowns have been pivotal to prevent banking theft protests).
It won't be one thing. And someone posting here won't have the best insights, and access.
https://apcoworldwide.com/blog/xi-jinpings-new-era-of-global...
"Leading the world in science and technology" means "having more advanced science and technology than the rest of the world"; and even "providing a model" means, "letting people copy it if they feel like it". That's all completely about China.
When people talking about the US leading the world, it's more about guidance and influence over coordinated action; NATO, climate change, IMF, WHO, etc. That's something China as a country has never been particularly interested in.
Imagine, for instance, China trying to arrange sanctions in response to something. They're not even close to having that kind of influence, and they're not particularly trying.
Obviously there's a need for a small portion of pioneers. But should society aim for mass creativity or just highlight those who cannot not create.
From another news source (CBS):
"The park closed Monday for testing of staff and visitors, Walt Disney Co. and the government said in separate statements. The city health bureau said guests all tested negative and were allowed to leave by 8:30 p.m., but one visitor from elsewhere in China told the Reuters news agency she didn't make it out until 10 p.m.".
https://www.cbsnews.com/amp/news/shanghai-disneyland-closed-...
And how is that bad for Chinese gov? That's exactly what the gov wants - total control over peoples lives, over crossborder flow, but the main reason are health codes allowing total control over population. XJP literally wants his China be NoKo 2.0, COVID was just extremely good excuse, if COVID leaked from Chinese lab I would not be suprised if this was the their goal - introducing COVID zero strategy to have control over whole population under pretense of fighting the virus.
Meanwhile my family can't really come to visit abroad (and they are the lucky ones having passports, good lucking getting new passports and being allowed to travel abroad for pleasure), we could in theory visit China but it's too troublesome and risky under these conditions.